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BY 
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD 



MODES AND MORALS 
A CHANGE OF AIR 

HAWAII: SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS 

VAIN OBLATIONS 

TEE GREAT TRADITION 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



MODES AND MORALS 



^ 



MODES AND MORALS 



BY 
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD 




NEfF YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1920 



C^t^f 2r 






Copyright, 1920, hy 
Charles Scribners Sons ^' 



Piiblished February, 1920 



Copyright, 1918, by HARPER c& BROTHERS 

Copyright. 1914, by HENRY HOLT & COMPANY 

Copyright, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1919, by THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY 

COMPANY 



FEB 25 1920 



THE 6CRIBNER PRE68 

OCI.A565022 



fs/\:< -V 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



The New Simplicity 3 

Dress and the Woman 37 

Caviare on Principle 58 

The Extirpation of Culture 66 

Fashions in Men 94 

The Newest Woman 118 

Tabu and Temperament 134 

The Boundaries of Truth 164 

Miss Alcott's New England 182 

The Sensual Ear 199 

British Novelists, Ltd. 218 
The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling 254 



MODES AND MORALS 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 

MY first caption was Democracy, Plumb- 
ing, and the War, That will hardly 
do as a title, for it does not hint the 
heart of the matter; though the war has pre- 
cipitated conditions which our special form of 
democracy has long been preparing us for, and 
plumbing is perhaps as symbolic as it is ubiquit- 
ous in the American domestic scene. All three, 
with all their implications, are factors, certainly, 
in our present problem of living, and if war 
has brought that problem to acuteness, democ- 
racy and plumbing (and what they may be 
taken to stand for) have made us ripe for up- 
heaval. Edison and his like are as responsible, 
in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William 
Haywood. All three have, without doubt, con- 
tributed to the present and future dilemma of 
educated people in moderate circumstances. 
War has, of necessity, turned moderate circum- 
stances to actual poverty; but democracy and 
plumbing were already preparing the debacle 
for this group. All of us — the educated classes 
as well as the uneducated — are guilty together, 
that is, of pampering ourselves with physical 
comforts; and democracy always makes for 
materialism, because the only kind of equality 

[3] 



MODES AND MORALS 



that you can guarantee to a whole people 
is, broadly speaking, physical. Democracy and 
plumbing, as well as war, make the problem of 
our immediate future a rather special one. We 
do not share all phases of it with our Allies. 
Let me explain, a little, what I mean. 

If America has led the world in labor-saving 
devices, it is because America is democratic on 
a bigger scale than any other country. The per- 
son who profits by the labor-saving device is 
the person who does the work. The fact that 
France and England have not kept pace with 
us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical 
appliances does not mean — as we have some- 
times fatuously taken it to mean — that they are 
less civilized than we. It means only that per- 
sonal service has been, with them, cheaper and 
more a matter of course. Where prosperous 
Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and elec- 
tric washing machines and garbage incinerators, 
prosperous Europeans multiply their number 
of servants. The Englishman really prefers a 
huge tin tub in his bedroom of a morning. We 
prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on 
the tap. That preference may well have become 
so natural that we cannot explain it. But the 
origin of the American preference is surely 
that in America only the very rich could afford 
a personal servant whose duty it was to set up 
the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and re- 
move all traces of the bath as soon as it was 

[4] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



done with. Even a few years ago, I remember 
having great dIfEculty In a London hotel of the 
better sort (but very English and almost to- 
tally unfrequented by Americans) in getting 
the chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The 
hotel was much too British to run to numbers 
of private baths. Hence the crying need of a 
slop-jar. The maid finally stole one for me 
from a room across the corridor, and assured 
me that the gentleman from whom she stole 
would not miss it. Nothing would induce her 
to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I am 
informed, by friends who have more British 
social experience than I, that slop-jars are not 
in the best English tradition — ^because, theo- 
retically, in the opulent old-fashioned house- 
hold, as soon as you have washed your hands, 
the water in which you washed them, the towel 
on which you wiped them, mysteriously and 
gracefully disappear. Perfection of service lies 
in having plenty of dexterous servants lying in 
wait to discover your needs; so many servants, 
and such well-trained ones, that you cannot 
wash your hands without their becoming aware 
of it and, with the least possible impinging on 
your notice, removing the traces of your ablu- 
tions. Perfection of service does not involve 
your emptying your own wash-basin, even into 
a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar. 

Now there are very few of us who would 
take the trouble to invent a tiled bathroom if 

[5] 



MODES AND MORALS 



our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and 
removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if 
a hot-water can miraculously sprang into being 
as soon as the desire for hot water seized us. 
There is no labor-saving device so perfectly 
convenient as ringing a bell and having some 
one else do the thing for you with complete 
competence. It is by no means strange that 
well-to-do Europeans have been content to be 
supremely waited upon, instead of making 
practical tasks mechanically easier for them- 
selves. The goddess of the labor-saving inven- 
tion is the woman who does all, or a good 
share, of *'her own work." Old-fashioned 
English and French houses are cold; but 
(climate apart) nothing like so cold as Ameri- 
can houses would be if Americans depended on 
open fires. For in England or France there are 
ten people to make the fires, to one in America. 
We simply dare not — again, climate apart — 
depend, as our British cousins have been wont 
to, on open fires. The average household can- 
not afford the servants to do incessant fire- 
making all over the house. 

So we have multiplied devices, from the 
modest kitchen cabinet up; because that ma- 
jority which advertisers and inventors are 
always trying to reach does a lot of things for 
itself. Even those Americans who always have 
had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of ser- 
vants, have indulged in these devices. For 

[6] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



pure philanthropy's sake? Well, I am afraid 
not quite. Rather, because the standard hav- 
ing been set by the mistress who is also the 
servant, the standard must be lived up to, or 
professional servants would complain. The 
interesting point is that in America the stand- 
ard is set by the woman who does her own 
work or a part of it, or who may, at any given 
moment, have to occupy herself thus. We are, 
you see, a democracy beyond the democracies 
of other lands. For it is not simply a question 
of money; it is a question of our all being in 
the same boat. 

I am not going into the servant question, 
for that is a question as trite as it is tragic. 
But, as we all know, even before the war it was 
growing acute. The best servants we had in the 
old days came from the countries where per- 
sonal service was a tradition — chiefly from the 
territories of Great Britain. But northern 
Europe is ceasing to enter domestic service; 
rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read 
the pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the 
"women's magazines," even sometimes in phil- 
anthropic periodicals. What they all say is that 
the only way you can keep your cook in your 
kitchen is to treat her as if she were the gover- 
ness, or to give her factory hours and factory 
freedom — to put her on a level, that is, with 
the more independent worker. At that, they do 
not give us much hope of keeping her. But I 

[7] 



MODES AND MORALS 



fancy that, before we turn the whole house 
over to the cook, we shall dispense with her 
and get our meals from co-operative kitchens. 
I have noticed of late years in the magazines 
that deal with architectural and decorative 
problems increasing stress on the absurdity of 
having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only 
one reason: that here is a room which must 
be cleaned, which, therefore, means more ser- 
vice. If you have your meals in the "living- 
room," you dispense with so much floor-and- 
wall space to be gone over. In only that sense 
is it absurd. For most of us will agree that 
while English lodgings are all very well, espe- 
cially for a solitary creature, it is a painful 
business for a large family to eat three meals 
a day in a room which has to be lived in other- 
wise. All people may not have the prejudice 
known to some of us against social consump- 
tion of food; but any one will agree that the 
best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind 
it. A dining-room may be a luxury, but it is 
not an absurdity, so long as you can by any 
means afford it. If the aesthetic and pseudo- 
aesthetic experts in domesticity are telling us 
that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is only be- 
cause they wish to prepare us for an inevitable 
contraction of our comfort, an unavoidable 
mitigation of decency. The one most aristo- 
cratic element in life, physically speaking, is 
spaciousness; it has always been in the best 
[81 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



tradition to be frugal to starvation in a corner 
of a palace. But we have come nowadays to 
care more for what we eat (I fear) than for 
how or where we eat it. The abolition of the 
dining-room is only a further step on the road 
we entered when we moved en masse out of 
houses into flats. It has been hard to get ser- 
vice; and meanwhile we have grown soft and 
would rather do without those amenities which 
are not conveniences than to furnish them for 
ourselves. 

It must in fairness be admitted that two 
things have combined to bring us to this pass. 
The most obvious fact is this of the labor situa- 
tion, which is now immensely accentuated by 
the war. But another force has always been at 
work. Except in that part of the country which 
imported slaves early and kept them as long as 
it could, more or less pioneer standards pre- 
vailed. We were a new country; we dispensed 
perforce (as in other colonies) with many of 
the inherited comforts. Our love of personal 
(I do not mean political) independence was a 
kind of protective coloring. The enforced sim- 
plicity of the pioneer scene bred in us a distaste 
for being waited on too importunately. Because 
we had to do certain things for ourselves, we 
developed a preference for doing them, a dis- 
taste for the constant interposition of another 
human being among the more private processes 
of existence. Even in the South, some modifica- 

[9] ■ 



MODES AND MORALS 



tion of the tradition must have been necessary, 
for the South must always have been badly, 
though exuberantly, served. Here and there a 
butler, a lady's maid, may, after years of 
struggle, have been highly trained; and the 
colored race has a gift for cooking. But in 
many ways Southerners must have contended 
with the disheartening conditions faced by all 
English households in the outposts of empire, 
dependent on another and a stupid race for the 
satisfaction of their needs. Southern luxury lay 
in having a score of inadequate menials to keep 
the masters as comfortable as three or four 
really good servants would have done. It was 
slave labor, and slave labor reaches compe- 
tence only by sheer force of numbers. There 
was never an ideal of domestic service there, 
because there was never the rounded conception 
of civilized domestic comfort in any slave's 
mind. And nothing is more slovenly or incom- 
petent in domestic service than the younger 
generation of free-born negroes. I do not think 
the colored race is going to prove our domestic 
salvation. 

We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the 
first place, for the reasons I have given. By 
the labor-saving device we have been brought 
insensibly to an almost animal dependence on 
creature comforts. With all our theoretical 
glorification of simplicity, we have really prided 
ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries, 

[lO] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



and most of all, it must be said, on those 
physical luxuries which have no aesthetic value. 
Our plumbing has been our civilization. The 
European aristocracy is for the most part not 
so "comfortable" as the American middle 
class; and therefore we have considered our- 
selves the greatest nation in the world. We 
have been snobbish about many things, but 
about nothing so much as our electrical appli- 
ances and our skyscrapers. We have sinned, 
all of us together, as I said before; and now 
we are paying. Simplicity, austerity, even, are 
forced upon us; and it behooves those of us 
who really care, in spite of temporary aposta- 
sies, about real values, to take thought and to 
plan. The vital question is not whether we shall 
simplify, but how. On that depends our civiliza- 
tion. 

Neither the new war millionaires nor skilled 
labor can teach us that. We shall have need of 
all our trained perceptions, of all our first-hand 
and all our book knowledge, of what money 
has been most wisely spent for in the past, to 
make our choice intelligently. The new million- 
aire and the enriched laboring man will not, 
for the most part, be able to help us; for, by 
and large, having no experience of the finer 
things of civilization, they will not know. For 
ourselves, it does not much matter — for us 
who have seen a world in ruin and can never 
"care'' for anything in the same way again — 

[11] 



MODES AND MORALS 



but this is perhaps our first duty to our chil- 
dren. They cannot have all the things we were 
brought up to crave and expect; but they must 
have the essentials. What, in a practical sense, 
are those going to be? 

The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty 
to seventy-five dollars a day, buys an auto- 
mobile — not necessarily a Ford — which waits 
for him at the entrance to the mine. His wife 
buys finery. Both buy the best food they can 
get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by 
a distinguished representative of the Food 
Administration, that almost every class of the 
community was doing its duty in the way of 
food conservation, except skilled labor. That is 
the class which cannot be reached by appeal. 
The very poorest are still very poor, and they 
have neither the money nor the knowledge to 
enable them to indulge in forbidden gastro- 
nomic luxuries. The rich are apparently — in 
most cases — making it a point of honor to help 
out. But skilled labor, which is so necessary 
to the prosecution of war, which has never in 
its life been so pampered, so flattered, so kow- 
towed to, so overpaid (yes, I mean that; it is 
overpaid, and I will explain what I mean pres- 
ently), has lost its head. It probably believes 
the things the politicians and its own leaders 
have been saying to it. It will work, and con- 
sider itself patriotic for working — but it will 
exact from the rest of us, the public, a price it 

[12] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 

has no right to, and, lest the honor of our 
country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we 
shall pay it. It may be that the reckoning will 
come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in 
materialism that skilled labor will continue to 
rule the earth. Just so long as we feel our 
greatest need to be of the things it furnishes 
us with, and its greatest need is for the things 
we cannot furnish it with, our necks will be 
bowed under labor's yoke. Our only chance of 
emancipation lies in finding some of our great- 
est goods in fields not under labor's control. In 
other words, to live at all, in any peace, in any 
equanimity and longanimity, we must be as 
little materialistic in temper and desire as pos- 
sible. We must teach our children that the 
greatest goods are not the things that skilled 
labor produces. That is not only truth; it is 
self-preservation. Labor will have the motor- 
cars and the delicacies of the table, the jewels 
and the joy-rides; we must see to it that we 
keep something else, and learn to feel the im- 
portance of our treasure. If we can maintain 
a prestige value for the things of our choice 
(frankly, I doubt if we can) "the lords of their 
hands" may come to desire the things we have 
chosen, and help to make them accessible. But 
we must be careful to make no concessions; we 
must not take one step, ourselves. In the ma- 
terialistic direction. 

This is not snobbishness; it is a matter of 

[13] 



MODES AND MORALS 



life and death. No one is going to have leisure, 
any more, to be a snob or any such non- 
essential thing. At least, if any one has the 
time, it will not be the educated classes. We 
shall have to work as we have never worked 
before, physically as well as mentally. We shall 
have to learn to co-operate with one another, 
too; to make an almost religious brotherhood. 
For it is our children who matter, and we can- 
not begin too soon to prepare them for a world 
which has nothing in common with the world 
we knew. Only by joining in utmost effort with 
the like-minded can we hope to protect them. 
I know there are Utopians who see in the 
socialization of Anglo-Saxon governments hope, 
along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. 
They foresee, I suppose, the kind of Paradise 
that the Admirable Crichton (in Barriers im- 
moral and delightful play) must have experi- 
enced on the desert island. There is going to 
be only one party in England, Mr. Arthur 
Henderson has recently said — the Labor party. 
It may be. Let us hope that some of the "un- 
attached leaders'* will at least preserve logic 
if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Hen- 
derson's own argument is about as convincing 
as though one should say: in certain abnormal 
conditions martial law is the only regime that 
will work; therefore, since civil law has been 
found inadequate to conditions of riot and 
pestilence and famine, we must give it up 
altogether, and make martial law perpetual. 

[Hi 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



The real arguments against private, and for 
public, ownership are, of course, quite other 
than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is 
that Mr. Henderson evidently does not know 
bad logic when he sees it. Let Mr. Henderson 
and his followers keep the motor-cars, one is 
inclined to say, and we will keep the logic he 
discards. Private perception of the laws of 
logic is something we shall not be taxed for; 
though — let us not deceive ourselves — we shall 
have to make sacrifices to keep it. If we can 
acquire logic, we may have it. It may be in- 
creasingly difficult to maintain the methods of 
acquiring it: the best education, moral and 
intellectual, was becoming endangered before 
the war, and there is no telling what may be- 
come of it afterward. 

I seem to have wandered far afield from 
plumbing; and yet plumbing (as a symbol of 
materialistic comfort) is more than germane to 
the question. The group whose problem I am 
concerned with is a very large one, though 
always, anywhere, a minority: the professional 
man, the man in the smaller business position, 
the man on a salary, who has been decently 
bred, and who can never look forward to any 
real financial fortune. I do not include every 
one who has to economize strictly, for a large 
proportion of the people who have to econo- 
mize strictly are totally uneducated as to real 
values. But distinctly I include any of the last 
mentioned who are alive to something besides 



MODES AND MORALS 



materialistic needs. I do not include the people 
who want intellectual and aesthetic goods only 
for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind 
jealousy. That group, in any case, will cease to 
exist if intellectual and aesthetic goods cease to 
have a social value — as is more and more 
definitely coming to be the case. They were 
never anything but paid mercenaries in the 
struggle. 

How are we going to save, for our children 
and our children's children, the real amenities 
of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for rea^ 
sons of social prestige, have tended to hnk 
themselves to the group of the civilized. But 
the new millionaire has always been an indi- 
vidual case, and has, therefore, had to make 
concessions to the group already established. 
What we have never had before is the pro- 
letariat suddenly becoming, overnight, in its 
vast numbers, at once richer and more powerful 
politically than the little ^'educated" aristoc- 
racy. We all know what happens when that 
happens; if we have forgotten the French 
Revolution (and since 19 14 a good many of us 
have) we have the Russian Revolution to 
remind us. In this morning's newspaper I saw 
that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was 
one-half a pound for the proletariat, one-eighth 
of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or 
may not be true, but there is nothing in known 
facts to make it incredible. Even granting that 

[16] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



skilled labor is not going to Bolshevize itself 
completely, there is no doubt that the minority 
of which I speak Is going to be virtually, if not 
theoretically, discriminated against. Labor Is 
not going to draw distinctions between employ- 
ers of labor; the college professor is going to 
have to pay the plumber, the carpenter, at as 
exorbitant rates as the great manufacturer. 
Any one who employs labor at all — even if it 
is only to repair a leak — is going to be gouged. 
All along the line, the producers of every ne- 
cessary element in civilized physical existence 
are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It is 
labor that is responsible for the high cost of 
living. Labor may say that the high cost of 
living is responsible for its increased demands. 
In point of fact, there is every evidence that 
labor at present is demanding money, not for 
the necessities of life, but for the luxuries — 
just like the capitalists they have so inveighed 
against. One would have to be a professional 
reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge of 
human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised 
by this phenomenon. Most men harve always 
wanted as much as they could get; and posses- 
sion has always blunted the fine edge of their 
altruism. That is what labor has always said 
about the employers of labor; and the employ- 
ers can say it quite as truly of the employed. 
So long as you make the basis of life material- 
istic, this law will prevail. 

[ 17 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



What, then, are we going to do about it? 
We shall not be able to afford many of the 
luxuries we once thought necessities, and we 
must decide, with the utmost possible wisdom, 
what are necessities and what are not. We had 
better make our list as short as possible, at 
that. Obvious luxuries we shall not have: 
motor-cars, fine clothing, plenty of domestic 
service, the joys of travel. It is costing us more, 
all the time, to provide the hygienic necessities 
for our children: pure milk, nourishing food, 
good air, healthful recreation, seasonable cloth- 
ing. I do not mean complicated food, or ex- 
travagant amusements, or elaborate clothing; 
I mean the irreducible minimum required for 
health and simple comfort and decency. And 
we cannot all — especially the professional peo- 
ple — go back to the farm and live on our own 
produce. We have to struggle along as best we 
can in the communities to which our work has 
called us. 

In some ways the life of the spirit and the 
life of the intellect have always been expensive. 
The more obvious material comforts — rich 
food, for example — have not been necessary to 
either. Neither, in a sense, has fine clothing or 
expensive furniture. Yet it must be remem- 
bered that both the life of the spirit and the 
life of the intellect tend, in most cases, to 
develop the sense of beauty; and that too much 
ugliness can become a pain and an obstacle to 



Tui NEW SIMPLICITY 



calm. There Is a simplicity that is pleasing, and 
a simplicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the 
social importance of good clothes and good 
furniture, there is, in downright ugliness, a 
power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the 
power to work. But we will neglect, for the 
moment, the aesthetic side of It. In the matter 
of food we will willingly simplify. In the mat- 
ter of adornment, whether of our persons or 
of our houses, we shall have to simplify, and 
we can only hope that our simplification can be 
conducted more along quantitative than along 
qualitative lines. We shall try to omit rather 
than commit; to be austere rather than cheap. 
The matter of servants is going to hit us 
harder; for only with "help" — In the quite 
literal sense — can we manage to get any peace 
or any time, in the hours left free by our 
wage-earning, for reading, for contemplation, 
for conversation. The "general houseworker" 
has tended to disappear; which is an acknowl- 
edgment that when a great many different 
things have to be done, one human being can- 
not stand the strain. Only by her being helped 
out by the family, only by some features of 
household service being scanted or ill done, 
could the general houseworker ever manage to 
keep outside her job. The good cook could not 
also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect 
child's nurse. Neither can the good physician, 
the good lawyer, the good clergyman, also be 

[I9l 



MODES AND MORALS 



the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, 
and the perfect butler — with hours of casual 
bookkeeping, plumbing, and carpentering. Even 
if he had the talent, he would not have the 
time; for the physician, the lawyer, and the 
clergyman are not safeguarded by an "eight- 
hour day.'* His wife, moreover, even if she 
has no private intellectual interests, cannot suf- 
fice to all the modern domestic tasks any more 
than can the general houseworker, who has 
faded out of existence precisely because she 
could not. We shall modify as we can; shall 
have our food sent in from outside where that 
is possible; shall buy vacuum cleaners (on the 
instalment plan) ; shall win occasional hours of 
freedom by hiring some safe person to come in 
and watch over the children while they sleep. 
Hospitality will, of necessity, be much cur- 
tailed. Our personal freedom — in any familiar 
sense of the term — will be almost n'lL We 
might defy our house, our garden, our table, 
our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot 
defy our children to shackle us. 

In these ways, we shall probably intrigue for 
the life of the spirit, the life of the intellect. 
But, still, they are expensive. Education — good 
education — is, in the first place, expensive. I do 
not know how much it costs to make a man a 
good plumber or a good coal-miner or a good 
carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so 
much as it does to make him a good doctor or 

[20] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



a. good clergyman. It takes seven years after 
the "prep" school or the high school to start 
the professional man on his road, costing fairly 
heavily all the time. That is why I said that 
skilled labor is overpaid — it gets an exorbitant 
return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to 
have college for our boys, even if they do not 
take up a profession — ^just because we think 
that education is going to matter to a man, all 
his life, no matter in what field he works. The 
joys of travel, as I intimated, are going to be 
cut out for most of us; the opera and the play 
will become infrequent blessings. But we shall 
have to have some books — even if we do not 
start the furnace until December. Indeed, the 
books we have ourselves are perhaps going to 
be our best guarantee of our children's being 
educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed 
on them, with increasing heaviness; but then, 
the coal-miner will (let us hope) be taxed on 
his motor-car. 

It may be that we shall come to state- 
endowed motherhood, and all the rest. But 
the trouble is that all these socialistic schemes 
are based on a lower-class demand on life. 
State endowment of motherhood will perhaps 
have to come ; but what does it guarantee except 
the child born under decent conditions? The 
health of the mother, and through her of the 
child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. Et apresf 
Pure milk may be provided at municipal sta- 

[21]' 



MODES AND MORALS 



tions; there will be a day nursery and then a 
public kindergarten. There will follow — if 
modern "educators" have their way — the 
whole desolating career in the public schools, 
where real education is reduced to a minimum, 
and 'Vocational" training is substituted. The 
child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks 
of skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually 
have his motor-car and his tiled bathroom and 
his "movie" every night. 

Yet for some of us this is not a supremely 
cheering prospect, because it is a wholly ma- 
terialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing to 
start with health as a requisite. Certainly every- 
thing that can be done to insure a healthy 
childhood, in every case where it is physically 
possible, should be done. But the great mistake 
of the reformers is to believe that life begins 
and ends with health, and that happiness be- 
gins and ends with a full stomach and the 
power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the 
finer kind. It may be that the enormous expense 
of guaranteeing health to all children born in 
our vast American community will take all the 
money that the community has. It may be that 
no one will ever be free to devote his health to 
pursuing the life of the mind and the spirit — 
to the purposes, that is, of civilization not 
purely physical. But we have not come to that 
yet; and the war is there to remind us that we 
really do not know precisely what will come. 

[22] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



If real socialism — as distinguished from our 
temporary utilization of certain socialistic 
methods — comes, we shall inevitably turn our 
backs on civilization for a time. Successful 
socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. 
Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded 
and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten 
failure in any but a physical sense. Even though 
it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You 
can guarantee the things of the body to every 
one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the 
spirit to every one ; you can guarantee only that 
the opportunity to seek them shall not be de- 
nied to any one who chooses to seek them. 
And socialism, believing as it must (to hold its 
head high) in the spiritual as well as the politi- 
cal equality of men, is not going to create spe- 
cial opportunities for the special case. "To hell 
with the special case" is implicit in the socialist 
slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in 
this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting 
that the minority is precious? That any minor- 
ity is precious? Is there any evidence whatever 
that the socialist is less avid of personal politi- 
cal power, less averse to demagogic methods, 
than the other person? Does he himself go far 
to prove his perfectionism? A good many 
socialists are calling other socialists names 
because they put nationality before interna- 
tionality; though any one with any sense could 
have told them beforehand that they would, 

[231 



MODES AND MORALS 



because human beings are — fortunately or un- 
fortunately — like that. Lenin and Trotzky 
are disappointed because the German socialists 
do not rise to betray their rulers; and some 
socialists are disappointed because Lenin and 
Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out to 
Germany in order to keep themselves — two 
individuals — in places of power. Every one is 
calling names all round; and if socialism were 
anything in particular, it would (one would 
think) be very sorry for itself. 

What is clear is this: that the socialization 
of governments places vast power in the hands 
of the skilled laborer. It is only in order that 
labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as 
possible that we have socialized our national 
organization. We need, chiefly for war's sake, 
certain physical things — food, munitions, coal, 
khaki clothing, and transportation for the 
same. We are calling for Y. M. C. A. men, 
and K. of C, and chaplains; but what we 
really expect of them, more than anything else, 
is to go under fire, if necessary, to give the sol- 
diers tobacco and hot chocolate. The news- 
papers lay eager and delighted stress on the 
unclerical nature of the services these gentle- 
men find themselves cheerfully performing. 
War, you see, is a physical business. Of the 
spiritual side of it I am not going to speak. No 
one really can speak of it in terms of actual 
achievement until the armies have come home 

1241 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



and we see what manner of men they are. You 
cannot tell from the straws you see which way 
the great last wind of all is going to blow. 
Some wise people doubt whether the veterans 
of this war are going to spiritualize the world. 
Many of them will have had, at this or that 
supreme moment, something akin to a spiritual 
revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a des- 
perately and exclusively personal thing; you 
cannot socialize It. It is incommunicable, and 
for the most part Inexpressible. The attempt to 
socialize a spiritual experience ends In the 
camp-meeting; it goes no farther. Like all men- 
tal ecstasies, It cannot be felt simultaneously by 
millions of people. I fancy that the opinions 
the veterans are going to express at the polls 
are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly 
kow-towing to the materialists for the sake of 
the armies. Whether the armies will wish to 
kow-tow to them when the war Is over Is a ques- 
tion more difficult of present solution than the 
Balkan boundaries. Certainly, If the armies have 
developed an esprit de corps and a philosophy 
of their own, they will be listened to. We shall 
inevitably be very sentimental about them. 
Whether we shall continue to be sentimental 
about the man who selected this moment to 
hold up his country and his compatriots for 
exorbitant pay, and demonstrated his patriot- 
ism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal 
only with the present situation. 

[25] ' 



MODES AND MORALS 



What, the present outlook being what it is, 
can we count on for our children? We shall be 
practically aided, in time, as I have said, by all 
sorts of co-operative schemes — invented for 
the use of the very poor, and adapted and 
expanded, of necessity, for the not quite so 
poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of 
the space and the privacy, will have gone Irre- 
trievably. After considerations of health come 
considerations of education. We shall not be 
able, probably, to afford private schools for 
our children; and our sole comfort must be 
that most private schools are not much good, 
anyhow. They are a little safer gamble, in most 
communities, than the public schools. That is 
all. We, the parents, must supplement the bad 
teaching as best we can, must keep at least 
some spark of intelligent interest in the uni- 
verse alive by the gas-log. It may well become 
our painful and subversive duty to inform our 
children, from the beginning, that what Is be- 
ing offered them by the state as education Is 
not really education at all ; and that teaching a 
boy how to make bookshelves is In no sense a 
substitute for teaching him to read and appre- 
ciate Latin. (Better not mention Greek!) It Is 
very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, for 
our daughter to know how to cook; but we 
must not permit her to consider that domestic 
science Is education, in the proper sense. We 
must keep the fact before ourselves and before 
F26I 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



the next generation that the training of the 
mind does not mean quite the same thing as 
the training of the muscles. Time was when a 
cobbler — and I do not mean anything so re- 
mote and legendary as Hans Sachs — found 
philosophy a very natural complement to cob- 
bling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who 
was much In demand among the intellectuals, 
as being one of the few people who could 
expound Emerson's transcendentalism in a 
completely satisfactory way. He went about — 
I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the 
canny saintllness of his much-modelled face, the 
thin figure under the long black cloak — to 
philosophical conferences, to discuss metaphy- 
sics with the metaphysicians; and returned to 
sit in his little shop and cobble shoes. But one 
has yet to hear of philosophy's coming from a 
member of the lasters' union. Machinery means 
specialization; and It is an old story that there 
is no mental comfort or development In repeat- 
ing the same gesture for eight hours a day, 
even if one has time and a half for overtime. 
The single gesture is not educative. When you 
saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under 
your hands and you built up the whole con- 
sciously from the related parts; even when you 
were a mere cobbler, a physician to sick shoes, 
and had to know the whole shoe-organism — 
there was something In that humblest, most 
physical of tasks which demanded a conception 

[27] 



MODES AND MORALS 



in the brain. That time is gone, and If William 
Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, 
certainly his ghost will not. But If you think 
for a moment of the difference in mental atti- 
tude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled 
labor for what it Is. 

I am far from saying that, in this much 
simpler world which the increasing complica- 
tion of life Is going, paradoxically, to create 
for some of us, it is a bad thing that children 
should be ^'vocationally" trained. (You cannot 
say "vocationally educated," for that is virtu- 
ally a contradiction In terms.) Even so, it is 
only to a very limited degree that our sons can 
be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or 
their own carpenters or their own masons, for 
the unions will never allow it. It Is a very 
minor tinkering that Is permitted to the private 
person. You cannot help to paint your own 
woodwork In your own house, for the union 
painter will leave his job if you touch your 
private paint-brush in his presence. What good, 
after all, is this famous vocational training, 
except as you definitely choose to follow 
through life some one of the trades they teach 
you? It will not really make the whole man 
more efficient; for he will not be allowed to 
use his potential efficiency. It may teach him 
whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or a 
bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any 
power to practise either steamfitting or brick- 

.[ 28.] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



laying, unless he is willing to forsake all else 
and cling only to that. Never was such non- 
sense talked by any one as by the new "edu- 
cators.'* Labor frankly uses the argument of 
might and the big stick; but labor, as far as I 
know, does not pretend that it is something 
else. It rests its case cynically on our own pam- 
pered inability to get on without it. 

^'Philosophy can bake no bread," replied 
some philosopher to his critics, "but it can give 
us God, freedom, and Immortality." Those are 
the last things, I take it, that modern philoso- 
phy is really concerned with giving us; but the 
perversity of one generation need not obscure 
all history. It is possible for the contemplation 
of great ideas, of great art, of great poetry, 
of the epic motions of the human race as re- 
vealed in history, to mitigate physical depriva- 
tion. It is possible to have plain living and high 
thinking together — though it is not easy, and 
never has been, and some of the best-known 
exponents of that theory have been pitiful fail- 
ures. Certainly we of the minority must accept 
for ourselves austerities we were not bred to 
in our easy-going, materialistic generation. 
Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the wilful 
discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do 
without a hundred "necessities" that Dante 
and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must 
keep it possible for our children to delight In 
Dante and Shakespeare; we must not let the 

[29] 



MODES AND MORALS 



authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the 
world. And, for that, we must insist that the 
past be not closed to them, and that learning 
shall not be an unknown good. They will have 
to do it on bread and milk, not on caviare ; but 
It can be done on bread and milk. That is the 
point. 

I confess that as I look forth in these dis- 
tressed times on the vast American scene, I 
find myself pinning my hope to two things — 
the self-consciousness of this minority, and the 
older Eastern universities. For unless we plan 
our simplicities cannily, the other people will 
have won out; and unless the older universities 
keep up a standard of learning, hold the door 
open, by main force, to the past, the garnered 
lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress 
— but blindly, as the brute creation. The fact 
is that we are living In an obscurantist epoch. 
For surely it is obscurantism to deny the legiti- 
macy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, 
and those folk who would reduce everything to 
a physical basis are as deadly foes of light as 
their ancestors who saw in physical experi- 
ments nothing but the black art. Every sane 
person wants science left free to accomphsh 
its marvellous work; but no sane person past 
early youth would say, as a young woman 
fresh from her college laboratories said to me 
a few days since, that chemistry is the root of 
all knowledge. The Protestants, when they 

[30] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



were on top, were as given to obscurantism, 
and its accompaniment of persecution, as the 
Catholics. 

In the matter of education, as I have sug- 
gested, we shall have to rely on the older 
colleges of the East. We cannot count on the 
West to help us, for the West is cursed with 
state universities. It is by no means my inten- 
tion or my private inclination to minimize the 
value of the state universities. The point is 
that they are uncertain ; they are not free ; they 
are dependent, in the last analysis, on public 
favor, which means public funds, on a kind of 
initiative and referendum. They may have 
good luck and become great schools of learn- 
ing; they may have bad luck and become indif- 
ferent and negligible places. They are not 
really allowed to set their own standards; they 
must ever be compromising with the personnel 
of state legislatures. The private colleges and 
universities of the East at least are not depend- 
ent on politics. Their funds are for the most 
part inadequate, but they do not have to 
change their curricula to please people who 
know nothing about what a curriculum should 
be. As long as their private fortunes last, they 
can afford to say the thing which they believe 
to be true. One of the most heartening things 
that have happened since 1914 is the acquisi- 
tion of great wealth by Yale University. It 
means — one hopes — that one at least of our 

[31] 



MODES AND MORALS 



old academic foundations can snap its fingers 
at Ignorance enthroned ; that it can send out its 
thousands endowed with some sense of intel- 
lectual values. Intellectual values are not the 
only ones; but most sane people believe that 
only by the rigid training of the mind can 
human beings be taught wise living and moral 
values. There is no morality by instinct, though 
there can be morality by inherited inhibitions. 
There is no social salvation — in the end — 
without taking thought; without mastery of 
logic and application of logic to human experi- 
ence. These things, because they are not the 
natural man, are not carelessly come by; they 
must be deliberately achieved. You will not 
learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the 
I. W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Hender- 
son. A great deal is said nowadays about prac- 
tical politics and the role of the practical man 
in building the social structure. Before you can 
carry out an idea you must have the idea. 
You cannot get rid of the world of abstract 
thought. One after the other, leaders of the 
Church are laying more and more stress on 
religion*s being a strictly social matter. Per- 
haps It is, though I do not believe it. I should 
have said that social regeneration was a by- 
product of religion, not religion itself. But 
even the folk who think that Christianity 
means no slums, and means little else, derive 
their sanction — or think they do — from Christ, 

[32] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



who dealt In abstract Ideas more exclusively 
than any other religious teacher the world has 
had. 

We must, then, seriously facing the moral, 
political, and physical conditions of our time, 
be frankly ascetic. We must make our children 
healthy, first of all — If only because specialists 
will be beyond our pocketbooks. I have Implied 
that the combination of plain living and high 
thinking is a difficult one ; I fancy it is the most 
difficult in the world. ''The hand of little em- 
ployment hath the daintier sense.'* We shall 
obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as pos- 
sible, not by engaging other people to take the 
burden of those coarser contacts, but by buy- 
ing, as we can, the machinery that will suffice 
to them impersonally. We shall "co-operate" 
to the limit of our incomes, losing thereby, I 
repeat, many of the amenities which tend to 
civilize. We shall not sleep soft, we shall not 
live high, and we shall do without external 
beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in 
cramped quarters, and if we achieve the dig- 
nity of one spacious room, that will be a great 
deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. 
But if we have a dollar to spend on some wild 
excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on 
asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, 
we shall not go to Europe or Asia, which 
would be beyond our means; but we shall find 
some quiet spot where there will at least be 

[33]' 



MODES AND MORALS 



trees and sky and no motor-cars or aeroplanes. 
We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of space 
and privacy by a very perfectly developed cour- 
tesy and by the capacity for silence. It sounds 
monastic, and, at its best, monastic it will be. 
Certain things we shall have given up at the 
start; certain ambitions will have been erased 
from our tablets. We shall not compete with, 
or interfere with, the lords of this world. We 
shall do our modest work, and receive our 
modest pay, and by a corresponding modesty 
of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, 
the unsympathetic and uncomprehending. Our 
kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead 
of complaining and criticizing, we must apply 
ourselves to realizing that our compensations 
can be made greater than our losses. We shall 
be passionately concerned with humanity; the 
more so, that we shall endeavor to be aware 
of the voice of God as well as of the voice of 
the people. We shall not be snobs in any sense ; 
for we shall have the same charity for other 
people's choices that we beg them to have for 
ours. Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly — 
in America, at least — among the impoverished. 
Even those who find all this an intolerable 
idea will dub it Utopian. A counsel of perfec- 
tion It certainly is. But the higher the standard 
we set for ourselves the less likely we are to 
put up with a low one. And if we merely drift, 
I fear we shall find ourselves getting nothing — 

l34] 



THE NEW SIMPLICITY 



wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar 
race for physical privileges, and leaving to one 
side the intangible goods. We can guarantee 
our children nothing except that they shall be 
armored against certain kinds of suffering; the 
lust of non-essentials, for example. I do not 
say that we shall not lose much that our best 
interest would suggest our having; but we shall 
not lose everything. And with the new simplic- 
ity will come some of the compensations of 
earlier simplicity. The man who has three 
things gets more pleasure out of one than does 
the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall 
capture the "joy in widest commonalty spread." 
A rose will always be cheaper than an alligator 
pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as 
much and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, 
I have no doubt, to Thomas Edison and the 
other genii of democracy. In some ways we 
shall fare better than folk of our clan in 
Europe. We must thank our stars for plumbing 
— itself a "joy in widest commonalty spread." 
But we shall value it chiefly as it releases time 
for better things, and those better things not 
physical pleasures. 

Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing 
with marble; we shall see that there is really 
no sense in marble when porcelain will do as 
well — that marble has better uses and should 
be kept for them. Not only shall we have no 
ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see 

[35] 



MODES AND MORALS 



that ermine was more beautiful when rarely 
and ritually worn. We shall learn to take pleas- 
ure in beautiful things that do not and never 
can belong to us; and we shall purge ourselves 
of the ignoble passion of envy. But the power 
to discriminate between the truth and a lie — 
which is the foundation of all moral and intel- 
lectual enjoyment — we shall cling to with 
greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and 
insult no law. I am far from believing that 
any group of people can achieve all this with 
completeness. But I believe we shall do well 
to set it before us as a goal. 



36] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 

THE creed and the fallacy of fashion, it 
seems to me, have seldom been better 
expressed than in the retort once made to 
a friend of mine, in one of our more conserva- 
tive New England towns. Sojourning there for 
a time, she had reason to order a hat from a 
local milliner. When she tried It on, it did not 
resemble in the least the headgear of the me- 
tropolis. "They are wearing hats very low, this 
year, you know," she protested. "Ah," was the 
unperturbed reply, *'they are wearing them 
high in Newburyport." I do not remember the 
fate of the hat — which is unimportant; but the 
statement has remained with me for years as 
one of the most significant Imaginable. It was 
at once the glorification and the reductio ad 
ahsurdum of modishness. My friend and the 
milliner spoke in the same spirit. For provin- 
cialism in dress consists merely In adhering 
rigidly to the av ant-dernier cri. The object of 
allegiance may be, in the provinces, a little 
tardily come up with; but the rigidity is pre- 
cisely the rigidity of the rue de la Paix. Fash- 
ion is not simply a question of longitude. 

The sense of mode might be considered, as 
so many other things have been, the possession 

[37] 



MODES AND MORALS 



that distinguishes man from the beasts. The 
peacock is no proof to the contrary; for If, as 
scientists suggest to us, all radiant plumage has 
been developed as a means of attraction, at 
least the Ideal of adornment has been, in the 
case of the birds, consistently aesthetic. The 
feathery fashions have always been intrinsic- 
ally good. Whereas (to be flippant) the at- 
traction exercised by the latest mode would 
seem usually to point to some principle of 
unnatural selection. The bird of Paradise, who 
is probably irresistible In his native forest, can 
be positively repellent on a hat. Yes; the sense 
of mode is curiously different from the sense 
of beauty. Let us, however, be serious. 

Preachers of all time — and satirists, who 
are lay-preachers — have declaimed against 
female extravagance in dress. It must be 
confessed that the sex of the more peace- 
ful pursuits has been the more exuberantly 
adorned. The male costume worn, say, at the 
court of Henri III, was every bit as bad as 
anything that contemporary ladles could have 
boasted; but even in the time of Henri III, a 
man had to hold himself ready for the saddle 
and the tented field. Some part of his life was 
bound to be spent In garments as rational as 
he could conceive them. It was the female sex 
that could expand, unchecked and unpruned, 
into such wild tendrils, such orchid-like incon- 
tinent bloom, of "changeable apparel." 

[38] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



From the earliest times, it is the woman 
who has been designated as the sinner In this 
respect. On this point, the Old and New Testa- 
ments are, for once, agreed; Isaiah and St. 
Paul are at one. "The chains, and the brace- 
lets, and the mufflers, the bonnets . . . and the 
earrings . . . the mantles, and the wimples, 
and the crisplng-pins . . . the fine linen, and 
the hoods and the veils," the one accuses; 
"broldered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly 
array," complains the other. Ezeklel thunders 
against "the women that sew pillows to the 
armholes" (the gigot sleeve in the reign of 
Zedeklah!) "and make kerchiefs for the head 
of persons of every stature, to hunt souls." 
And the tradition has remained. It is perhaps 
the only subject on which St. Ignatius Loyola 
and John Knox would have been thoroughly 
sympathetic. One is certainly at liberty to Infer 
from the chorus that it is easier for a camel to 
pass through the needle's eye than for anything 
really chic to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 

All these gentlemen, to be sure, seem to 
have objected to the fact and purpose of femi- 
nine adornment, rather than to rapid changes 
in the methods adopted. But I cannot believe 
that St. Paul, who scored the Attic curiosity 
born of the Attic ennui, would not have 
preached even more violently, had he foreseen 
the need, against fashion than against beauty. 
And is it not fashion rather than beauty that 

[39] 



MODES AND MORALS 



Is subtly discriminated against by all religious 
orders? The nun, like the Quakeress, must 
adopt a single color and a single mode; though 
nun and Quakeress, both, often find their 
chosen garb the most becoming they could 
possibly wear. No dress could be more beauti- 
ful than that which I remember from my 
childhood's convent. It fell in rich and simple 
folds of violet — violet being neither purple nor 
crimson, but something Indefinably magnificent 
midway between — enhanced by white linen 
guimpe and cream-colored veiling. It gave the 
daughter of a French duke, I remember, the 
aspect of a queen regnant. Yet It represented 
poverty, chastity, and obedience. No one Is 
especially concerned with the nun's being un- 
becomingly clad. A subtler mortification Is sup- 
posed to lie in her engaging to dress in exactly 
the same way all her life. The mortification is 
of course heightened by the fact that she 
shares her style of dress with the rest of the 
community, regardless of type. But In any case 
the first thing that the postulant renounces is 
fashionable clothing. They leave her curls to 
be cut off later. 

It is not, however, with the moral aspect of 
fashion that I am concerned. The moral ques- 
tion, Indeed, has ceased to be very poignant; 
even our Calvinist great-grandmothers per- 
mitted a shy predominance of trimming on the 
"congregation side" of their bonnets. The 

[40] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



moral aspect of fashion disguises itself nowa- 
days as an economic consideration. With eco- 
nomic considerations, again, I have no special 
concern. They are writ large over half the 
printed pages of our time. Some statistician 
every month proves to us something appalling : 
either that, 

. . . since our women must walk gay, and money buys 
their gear, 

materials are adulterated, or sewing-women 
are starved, or shop-girls seek the primrose 
path, or husbands die of the strain in their early 
forties. To much the same music, the New 
York Customs officials stage, each day, an 
elaborate melodrama on the steamship piers. 
We know that, from "Nearseal" to "Near- 
silk," the poor will sacrifice comfort to cut, and 
that a really "good" milliner makes a profit of 
a hundred per cent on each hat. These things 
are all true; and Heaven forbid that one 
should shirk the economic question ! But I very 
much doubt if either moralist or statistician 
will turn the trick. Yet they have only. It would 
seem, to enlist a few other facts as good as 
their own, to be quite sure of success. 

For not even the cynic will pretend that the 
real object of fashions is to disfigure. It is 
quite without intention that M. Worth and 
Mme. Paquin and all their prototypes, con- 
geners, and successors, have become the foes 

[41] 



MODES AND MORALS 



of beauty. They have simply never stopped to 
consider that the very notion of the changing 
mode is the negation of all aesthetic law. The 
most damning thing about fashions is that they 
make inevitably, nine years out of ten, for the 
greatest ugliness of the greatest number. And 
this is the real Achilles tendon of la mode. 
Can anything be more absurd than to impose 
a single style on the fat and the thin, on the 
minimum wage and the maximum income? 

I admit that no fashion has ever been 
created expressly for the lean purse or for the 
fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is undoubt- 
edly the thin millionairess. But the fat woman 
and the lean purse must make the best of each 
style in turn, as it comes along. And if one has 
ever seen a fat woman In (for example) a 
hobble skirt — even in an academic edition of 
a hobble skirt — one knows that this is not a 
light thing to say. As for the lean purse, it is 
not only in alarmist articles that the working- 
girl goes without half her luncheons to buy a 
rhinestone sunburst. One has known the cases. 
Nor is the coercion purely psychological. The 
cheapest Eighth Avenue suit, which, ready- 
made, costs something-and-ninety-eight cents, is 
sure to be a hasty and sleazy imitation (at 
many removes, and losing something with 
each) of a Fifth Avenue model. It is one of 
the few true paradoxes that people who must 
dress cheaply must dress *'in style." And that 

[42] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



is a hard fate for the hypothetical poor woman 
with intelHgence, who secretly desires a gar- 
ment that will be no more conspicuous next 
year than this, and longs to put some of her 
money into good materials. It is only a very 
good (and expensive) dressmaker whose 
handiwork can both elude the exaggerations of 
the present fashion and foreshadow the essen- 
tials of the next. That is another thing that 
every woman knows. 

The hypothetical poor woman with intelli- 
gence must content herself with looking a trav- 
esty on the successful chorus-girl. This, unfor- 
tunately, she comes only too easily to do. 
*'But," some one might object, "the poor wo- 
man is precisely an economic, not an aesthetic 
consideration." Granted: yet since we must all 
dress, why not invent dresses that are widely 
adaptable — to different materials, to different 
occasions, to different human types? It would 
purge our streets of many a sorry and sordid 
spectacle, and in that sense would be an 
aesthetic service both particular and public. 
But, as it is, we must all dress alike : blonde 
and brum, fat and thin, tall and short, rich 
and poor. The socialists have threatened us 
with no more rigid sisterhood than this. 

The principle of fashion is, as I have inti- 
mated, the principle of the kaleidoscope. A 
new year can only bring us a new combination 
of the same elements; and about once in so 

[43] 



MODES AND MORALS 



often we go back and begin over. Recently we 
have had rather a Napoleonic tendency. Occa- 
sionally we are Colonial. We have been known 
to be Japanese. Now and then we have a 
severe classic moment — usually very unbecom- 
ing to all of us. We used to hear from our 
grandmothers of silk dresses that could "stand 
alone." What we need now is a silk dress that 
could somehow manage to run. 

There is no reward, in the world of 
woman's dress, for a successful experiment. 
The most charming design in the world has 
no future. One is seldom tempted to apostro- 
phize a fashion with, "Verweile doch ! du bist so 
schon!"; but if one were, the adjuration would 
be as vain as ever. And that is another sin 
against beauty, for it deprives a woman of the 
privilege of dressing as best becomes her. 
There is something peculiarly bitter in watch- 
ing the superseding of a mode that wholly 
suits one. Now and then a woman confides to 
me her intention of keeping to some style that 
is especially adapted to her. "It suits me, and 
I am going to stick to it," she declares. She 
has found that it makes the most of all her 
"points"; it has given her, perhaps, renewed 
respect for her appearance and fresh zest for 
life. Such a woman is always, I believe, sin- 
cerely congratulated by her friends. They do 
not imitate her, but they really and unmali- 
ciously envy her her point of view. She is 

[44] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



proud of herself, and keeps to her decision 
for — say — a year. I never knew a woman to 
try such an experiment longer. She finds her- 
self invariably conspicuous — and no well-bred 
woman likes to be unnecessarily conspicuous. 
For modesty's sake she must adopt the extrava- 
gance of the moment. Otherwise, she discovers 
herself to be not rational but *' queer/' and her 
attempt at wisdom to be the worst of affecta- 
tions. It may be ironic that a woman who looks 
best in the mode of the Empress Josephine 
should be forced to dress en chinoise; but it is 
more than ironic when she has to dress en 
chinoise one year and en grecque the next. I 
have once or twice known elderly women who 
achieved something like a fixed costume for 
themselves; but they were semi-invaHds. The 
consistent costume is, like the nun's habit, the 
best possible proof of having renounced the 
world. 

And into what pits do the great couturieres 
not fall in the search for something "new" 
enough to destroy the eligibility of all last 
year's frocks ! I never knew what ladies patron- 
ized, a few years since, the London woman 
who invented ^'emotional dressmaking"; but I 
can testify to having seen, in a show-window of 
one of the largest department stores in Amer- 
ica, a model from her — is not the word 
*'atelier"? A large group of plain women were 
gathered, staring at it. I joined the group and 

[45] 



MODES AND MORALS 



read the legend. The name of the dress was 
"Passion's Thrall." At least, as the White 
Knight said, "that was what the name was 
calledJ* Within the shop, in the spirit of curi- 
osity, I followed a similar group to the 
"department" where such things live. Again, 
the emotional dressmaker. Isolated in a glass 
drawing-room, stood two draped figures : "Her 
Dear Desire," and "Afterwards." I could have 
imagined some one's buying "Her Dear De- 
sire" — it was of sad-colored chiffon. But I 
could not imagine any one's buying "After- 
wards" ; and it was inconceivable that the name 
should help to sell it. I am bound to say that 
eventually I found myself alone in the contem- 
plation of this sartorial drama. The crowd had 
followed a living model who was illustrating 
the possibility and method of walking in the 
new "Paquin skirt." The gravity of every one 
concerned was unbelievable. Mr. Granville 
Barker has done some admirable satire on 
dressmaking in The Madras House; but his 
third act is positively less poignant than a 
reality like that. 

Yet this is not the worst. Even if we said to 
ourselves, "Let us be always — but varyingly — 
ugly," we should not have phrased our greatest 
danger. Our greatest danger is simply the loss 
of all standards of beauty in dress. "Why do 
all the women walk like ducks this year?" was 
the question put to a friend of mine, years 

[ -!6 ] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



since, by a younger brother. He did not know- 
that a quite new kind of corset had suddenly, 
during the summer months, ^'come in." To 
wear It meant change of gait and posture, 
eventually actual change of shape. Yet we all 
wore It — and doubtless went on praising the 
Venus of Melos as we did so. The notion that, 
after we have learned from the scientists to 
deal in evolutionary periods of millions of 
years, we ought not naively to expect to alter 
the human form in a season or two, never 
occurred, I fancy, to any of us. "Business is 
business," men are credited with saying, when 
invited to apply abstract laws of honor. *'Fash- 
ion is fashion," women would surely say if 
invited to apply abstract laws of beauty. 

The worst thing is that the drapery or the 
trimming that is lovely and desirable in our 
eyes one year, is unspeakably offensive to our 
gaze the next. (Consider, for example, the 
chequered history of fringe ! — its career like 
that of a French Pretender.) Fashion has viti- 
ated our taste to that point. Our welcoming 
raptures are as sincere as our shuddering rejec- 
tions. There was a time when sleeves could 
not — I say it advisedly — ^be too large. I re- 
member seeing a girl turn to edge sideways 
through a large door, for fear of crushing the 
sleeves of a new bodice. Her brothers laughed; 
but I — I was very young — felt a pang of clear, 
unmitigated envy. I remember at that time 

[47] 



MODES AND MORALS 



prophecies that tight sleeves would never come 
in again — they were so ugly. Yet how many 
times, since then, have tight sleeves come in — 
and gone out? While, if one dared to make 
any prophecy about the clothes of the future, 
It would be that those very large sleeves would 
never again be worn : they are so hideous. 

There is no point in pretending that one is 
superior to this fluctuating standard. One is 
not. Ideally speaking, every woman should 
keep the language of fashion and the language 
of taste rigidly apart. "Fashionable" and 
''beautiful" should not be used interchangeably. 
Theoretically, we all acknowledge the differ- 
ence; but It Is another matter when we are 
faced by the actual product. There may be, 
here and there, a woman who can say with 
sincerity, "She wore a hideous thing she has 
just got from Worth"; but where is the 
woman who could ingenuously report: "She 
had on a lovely frock made In the style of year 
before last"? I could not do it myself; nor, I 
fancy, could you. We may not like the new 
mode the very first time that we see it; we may 
pity before we endure; but we end by embrac- 
ing. The bravest of us can do no more than 
criticize for Its ugliness something fashionable. 
When It comes to praising for its beauty some- 
thing unfashionable, the words stick In our 
throats. Clothes that are unfashionable simply 
do not look beautiful to us. Presently they 

[48] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



may, when the kaleidoscope has been turned 
again; but not now. And that means that we 
have given up a good deal of intellectual 
freedom. 

I have called the loss of aesthetic standards 
our greatest danger. One would prefer to think 
that it is. One likes to believe that the "pres- 
tige value'* of the current mode is due to an 
honest if mistaken conviction of its beauty, not 
to the Implications of income that both fash- 
ionable and unfashionable clothes make so 
definitely. It is pleasanter to say to one's self 
that the woman who refuses an Invitation to 
dinner because her best frock Is two years old 
fears criticism of her taste, than that she fears 
an estimate of her dressmaker's bill. The code 
is more alluring. But even assuming this to be 
the cause, the result Is no less unfortunate: 
namely, an almost universal social timidity on 
the part of unfashlonably dressed women — by 
which I mean, for the moment, nothing worse 
than women in frocks that were fashionable a 
season since. And that Is a pity. 

One does not, on the whole, regret history; 
and our Institutions are by this time historic. I 
offer the suggestion as one who is glad, rather 
than sorry, that John Adams was not (accord- 
ing to his reputed desire) created Duke of 
Braintree. But an hereditary aristocracy serves 
some charming minor purposes, one of them 
being, perhaps, the social countenancing of 

[49] 



MODES AND MORALS 



dowdiness. A duchess may be as dowdy as she 
likes; and other women may with impunity be 
the less smart in a land where there are always 
duchesses being dowdy. I am sufficiently Amer- 
ican, myself, not really to admire the typical 
Englishwoman's clothes. Half a dozen queer 
necklaces and a perfectly irrelevant bit of lace 
pinned on somewhere, do not atone to me for 
a faded straw hat at Christmas and a skirt 
that is six inches shorter in front than in back. 
Not many years ago, I went, with the brief- 
est possible interval, from a British suffrage 
meeting to a dress-rehearsal at the Comedie 
Frangaise. The resulting sensation amounted to 
a shock. "Frenchwomen could not dress like 
Englishwomen without conviction of sin," I 
said to my companion. "And ought not to," 
was his firm rejoinder. At the moment, I 
agreed with him. But there is something fine, 
after all, in the attitude of the woman who, 
having occasion to go to some "function" of a 
kind that she usually avoided, brought out a 
frock from her ten-year-old trousseau^ and had 
it furbished up by a sempstress. The frock, I 
should say, had passed from her mother's 
trousseau into her own, having served for the 
former's presentation at court on the occasion 
of her marriage. It may be that an untitled 
woman could not have done it so debonairly. 
It would certainly be hard for a good Ameri- 
can to follow her example. But the very idea 

[so] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



brings one such a hint of freedom as it takes — 
they say — a limited monarchy to give. 

Sensible people realize that children should 
not be overdressed, and a few schools in this 
country have adopted the conventual method 
of putting their pupils into uniforms. But the 
uniforms are, I fear, only another turn of the 
kaleidoscope. I know that in one such school, 
at least, the girls wear the school costume all 
day, but dress in the evening as variously and 
as elaborately as they choose. A rule like that 
is ma^nifique et pas cher. For grown-ups, there 
is no uniform at all. The fact is that we 
are uncomfortable if we are not fashionably 
dressed. No man understands the subtle and 
complex significance of the phrase ^'nothing to 
wear" — witness the distressed but utterly puz- 
zled expression that overspreads a man's face 
at the words. He knows that his wife or his 
sister looks charming in ^'the blue one," or 
"the lace one," or *'the one with the jet." She 
has looked charming In it often enough for 
him at last to identify it — and that, unless he 
is an exception to his sex, is very often. He is 
cheerfully getting into his evening coat for the 
fiftieth time. No wonder he does not realize 
that some frock which, the first time it was 
worn, made for triumph, should, the tenth 
time, make for humiliation. But the most 
strong-minded woman — the woman who will, 
if necessary, go to the opera on a gala night in 

[SI] 



MODES AND MORALS 



a coat and skirt — at heart exonerates the 
woman who so foolishly, for the reason men- 
tioned, stops at home. 

There is much to be said, whether in the 
fifteenth century or the twentieth, for the aris- 
tocracy of wealth and all that it can do for 
the community in which it prevails. Neither 
Florence nor New York, probably, if con- 
sulted, would wish, or would have wished, to 
give up its Magnificent. But there are minor 
ways in which an aristocracy of wealth makes 
us all more sordid. Obviously, in these condi- 
tions, one's income must constitute one's claim 
to distinction, and, obviously, one can give 
mannerly evidence of one's income only by the 
amount visibly, not audibly, spent. How more 
silently and more visibly than by personal 
adornment? Is all this too trite to say? It 
behooves the man, for many reasons, not to 
adorn himself — perhaps, even, not in any 
merely personal way to outshine other men — 
while his wife may not only please herself but 
render his reputation a positive service by out- 
shining other women. She makes no indiscreet 
disclosures of fact, but she rustles with pecu- 
niary implications. In an aristocracy of wealth, 
Paris may go far to make a peeress of her. 

I do not wish to Imply that this is the sole 
American standard: there are communities In 
which "family" counts; and there are the 
academic backwaters where strange-scaled fish 

[52] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



constitute among themselves aristocracies of 
intellect. It need hardly be said that in the 
latter places dress counts least of all. One may 
go to hear even the most distinguished lecturer 
in any rag one has; and we are judged rather 
by the obvious intention of a frock than by its 
actual achievement. There is so much of 
Oxford in any of our college towns. But no 
one can deny that the aristocracy most widely 
developed in America is that of wealth. It is 
developed in places that are really too small 
to afford an aristocracy at all. I myself have 
known women whose fathers carried dinner- 
pails and whose husbands have never even 
stopped to regret that their own education 
ended with the grammar-school course, who 
simply did not feel that the shabbily or simply 
dressed woman could be in their class. She may 
be descended from a half a dozen Signers, and 
be at home in every picture-gallery in Europe, 
but she is some one to whom, socially, they 
cannot but condescend. 

I am told that precisely the same standards 
prevail in the newer urban civilizations of Eng- 
land: it would seem to be an inevitable imme- 
diate result of the supremacy of riches. There 
is perhaps no limit to the sophistication that 
vast wealth can eventually give to its own pos- 
sessors; but this law of fashion is what, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, they impose on the 
seething estates beneath them. I have known 

[53] 



MODES AND MORALS 



tragedies In smallish American cities that be- 
gan and ended in dress : women deprived of 
their all too infrequent intellectual and social 
delights, simply because they could not bring 
themselves to face an assembly in which other 
women whose authority their own taste could 
not acknowledge, knew their "best" dresses by 
heart. 

I have said that the economic considerations 
are no concern of mine; nor are they. Yet it 
may not be amiss to suggest in this context 
that the women who are responsible for the 
almost unpaid toil of the slum-children over 
*'willow" plumes are not the rich women who 
will give for their willow plumes any price that 
is asked of them. It is the harpy of the sub- 
urbs, the frequenter of bargain-counters and 
Monday morning "sales," the woman whose 
most instructive reading is done among the 
designs and patterns of the "women's" maga- 
zines, who is responsible. From what one 
reads, one is certainly compelled to infer that 
if these little children are to be saved, willow 
plumes should be put at prohibitive prices. 
"But since our women must walk gay," the 
aristocracy that is rooted in democracy can 
hardly do without its willow plumes. Fashion 
has got itself into a position of such impor- 
tance as that. It is so terrible a thing to be 
unfashionable that the vast majority of women 
— and the vast majority of women are not rich 

[54] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



or anything like it — stretch every nerve to be 
in fashion. They miss, If they are not, too 
much that is legitimately theirs. The require- 
ment Is irrelevant, is absurd; but it Is made. 
They will, therefore, pay what they can; but 
they cannot pay much. The logic is clear. They 
go to the great shops to demand their willow 
plumes, and their Irlsh-lace collars, in the very 
spirit which took the Dames de la Halle to 
Versailles. Hence many of the conditions of 
labor about which we read so many lurid 
articles. For demand creates supply. 

The American woman of moderate Income 
is alternately congratulated on her "smartness^' 
and scolded for her extravagance. She cannot 
very well, as things stand, be smart without 
being extravagant. But the fact that chiefly 
gives one pause is this: that a woman cannot 
mingle comfortably with her equals unless she 
can clothe herself each season In a way that 
both to her and to them would have looked 
preposterous a twelvemonth before. It has 
luckily become, in the strictest sense, vulgar, to 
be endimanchee; but most people are — by defi- 
nition — vulgar; and I have known women, 
again, who stayed at home from church be- 
cause they could not so clothe themselves. Not 
unadvisedly, I am tempted to say; for In one 
of the most famous churches of America, I 
have seen the shabbily dressed woman seated, 
by the usher, with reference solely to her cos- 

[55] 



MODES AND MORALS 



tume; and I have heard, too, the testimony of 
other women of her kind, turned into "stay- 
at-homes'* because precisely that thing they 
could not endure. An odd battle of pride with 
pride; and there are better uses to put pride to 
than that. More blatant and less grim is the 
authentic anecdote recently told me concerning 
a Newport "colonist.'' She and her daughter 
entered the church one Sunday morning, mar- 
vellously dressed In contrasting shades of red. 
"There will be no one else in our pew this 
morning," she murmured graciously to the 
usher; "put some one in with us, if you like — 
any one in white or black." What could not 
Dean Swift have done with that! One does 
not wish to make tragedy out of what is essen- 
tially comic. Yet it may fairly be said that 
comedy has its rough side, and that a comedy 
retold from the point of view of the comic 
character himself, would often make melan- 
choly stuff. It would be possible, over this mat- 
ter of fashion, to shed the bitter tears of the 
satirist. 

It is odd that "dress reform" should always 
have meant something ugly. There would be so 
tremendous a chance for any one who wished 
to reform dress in the interest of beauty! But 
the most amused and disgusted of us will, very 
likely, forever shrink from the task. "The pil- 
grims were clothed with such kind of raiment 
as was diverse from the raiment of any that 

[56] 



DRESS AND THE WOMAN 



traded In that fair. The people, therefore, of 
the fair made a great gazing upon them : some 
said they were fools, some they were bedlams, 
and some they were outlandish men." There 
are two reasons why we shall shrink from it: 
we should have to begin with ourselves; and 
we should certainly be called bedlams. But oh, 
the pity of it I 



[57] 



CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 

ONE can usually either begin or end with 
Mr. Chesterton, though one can seldom 
do both. "It is simpler to eat caviare on 
impulse than to eat grape-nuts on principle," he 
says, in one of his intervals of pure lucidity. I 
should like to make a Chestertonian transposi- 
tion, and pronounce that it is better (I do not 
say simpler) to eat caviare on principle than to 
eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the 
modern fad of simplicity for its own sake has 
ceased to be merely ridiculous; it has become 
dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices 
against it? 

I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my 
own mind, socialists and vegetarians. But I 
nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if 
he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vege- 
tarian, that the answer is in the affirmative. I 
am sure that they, on their side, confuse snobs 
with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, 
were they more bitterly logical. For my own 
part, I should be quite willing to go the length 
of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a 
soul. I can even see myself joining a "move- 
ment" for giving the vote to violets and dis- 
franchising orchids. This, however, is not their 

[58] 



CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 



desire. They do not wish to make even the ox 
a citizen — only a brother; and I have never 
discovered that vegetarians — even when they 
were "hygienic," not '^sentimental," ones — 
were anxious to reproduce the history of the 
rice-fed peoples. But let their logic take care 
of itself. My point is really that socialists and 
vegetarians are banded together to fight for 
the simplifying of life. Socialism, of course, 
organizes as furiously as Capital itself; and I 
leave it to any one if a nut-cutlet is not compli- 
cated to the point of mendacity. But ostensibly 
both sects are on the side of Procrustes against 
human vagaries. Both would surely consider 
caviare immoral; either because no one ought 
to eat it, or because every one cannot. It does 
not much matter, I fancy, which point you 
make against the dried roe of the sturgeon. 
My own plea for caviare rests precisely on 
the fact that it is not, and cannot be, thrust 
into every one's mouth. It is not simple, no. 
The only really "simple" food-stuff is manna. 
Imagine, for example, calling anything simple 
that has to be shot out of a cannon by way of 
preparation. In point of fact, very few people 
eat caviare save on impulse, — otherwise, they 
find it too nasty. But it is an impulse worthy of 
being dogmatized; of becoming a principle. 

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, 
left free, instinctively complicates life. The 
hardest command to follow has always been 

I 59] 



MODES AND MORALS 



that which bids us take no thought for the 
morrow. Perhaps that is what Mr. Chesterton 
means when he talks of the difficulty of eating 
grape-nuts on principle. The real drawback to 
*'the simple life" is that it is not simple. If you 
are living it, you positively can do nothing else. 
There is not time. For the simple life demands 
virtually that there shall be no specialization. 
The Hausfrau who is living the simple life 
must, after all, sweep, scour, wash, and mend. 
She must also cook; from that, even Battle 
Creek cannot save her. She may dream sternly 
of Margaret Fuller, who read Plato while she 
pared apples; but in her secret heart she knows 
that either Plato or the apples suffered. And 
from v/hat point of view is it simpler to have a 
maid-of-all-work than to indulge one's self in 
liveried lackeys? Not, obviously, for the mis- 
tress; and it is surely simpler to be an adequate 
second footman than to be an adequate bonne- 
a-tout-faire. We should really simplify life by 
having more servants rather than fewer; 
more luxury instead of less. The smoothest 
machinery is the most complicated; and which 
of us wants to sink the Mauretania and go 
back to Robert Fulton's steamboat? One would 
think that the decision would be made naturally 
for one by one's income. But it is the triumph 
of the new paradox that this is not so. Thou- 
sands of people seem to be Infected with the 
idea that by doing more themselves they 

[60] 



CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 



bestow leisure on others; that by wearing 
shabby clothes they somehow make it possible 
for others to dress better — though they thus 
admit tacitly that leisure and elegance are not 
evil things. Or perhaps — though Heaven for- 
bid they should be right! — they merely think 
that by refusing nightingales' tongues, they 
make every one more content with porridge. 
Let us be gallant about the porridge that we 
must eat, but let us never forget that there are 
better things to eat than porridge. 

And all time past, was it all for this ? 
Times unforgotten, and treasures of things ? 

What is the use of throwing great museums 
open to the people, if you tell them at the 
same time that to possess the contents of the 
museums would not make a private person 
happier? Why should there be cordons hleus 
in the world, if we ought to live on bread and 
milk? Above all, why have we praised, through 
the centuries, all the slow processes, the tardy 
consummations, of perfection, if raw material, 
either in art or life, is really best? I recall at 
this instant a friend of mine who expresses her 
democracy in her footwear. Her frocks are as 
charming as money can induce Paquin to make 
them; but if her frocks are an insult to the 
poor, her boots are an insult to the rich. I 
have seen her walk to a garden-party, in real 
lace, and out at heel. She fancied, I think, that 

[6i] 



MODES AND MORALS 



her inadequate boots obliterated the deplorable 
social distinction between herself and her cook. 
In point of fact, her cook would not have con- 
descended to them; would not have considered 
herself a *'lady" if she had. 

I have other friends who feel strongly the 
Ignominy of personal service: who agree with 
many ignorant young women that it is more 
dignified to be a bullied, insulted, underpaid 
shop-girl with a rhinestone sunburst, than a 
well-paid, highly-respected parlor-maid in a 
uniform. Accordingly, they conscientiously de- 
prive themselves of the parlor-maid, and spend 
her wages in trying to get a vote for the shop- 
girl. I do not understand their distinctions in 
liberty, or their definition of degradation. The 
parlor-maid at least can choose the mistress, 
but the shop-girl cannot choose the floor- 
walker. 

I am, myself, essentially an undomestic 
woman, and I dislike the parlor-maid's tasks 
to the point of feeling excessive irritation at 
having, occasionally, in this mad world, to 
perform them. But, seriously speaking, apart 
from the temperamental quirk, I would don 
her clothes and follow officially her career, 
rather than that parlor-maids in uniforms 
should pass wholly from the world. It is as if 
these people said, *'Since those who are parlor- 
maids themselves cannot very well employ 
parlor-maids, then let no one have a parlor- 
f62l 



CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 



maid.'* Their factitious altruism, with all its 
peril, might be forgiven them; but the mis- 
guided creatures (who are human beings and 
egotists, after all, and as such must "save their 
face'') go on to say that it is really much nicer 
not to have parlor-maids. And that lie is un- 
pardonable, for it strikes at the root of human 
experience. Parlor-maids would never have 
become a convention if they had not been 
found desirable. 

Are we really, at this late day, going to be 
duped by the mid-century fallacy that "plain 
living and high thinking" are a natural combi- 
nation? Even if Shakespeare at New Place 
teaches us nothing, we cannot fail to be im- 
pressed by the memory of Thoreau, stealing 
home from Lake Walden by dark, to provide 
himself secretly with better fare than the woods 
afforded. As if, indeed, any one who had tried 
plain living did not know that high thinking 
was done, if at all, in spite of it! "The hand of 
little employment hath the daintier sense,'* as 
Shakespeare long since said. Let us open our 
own front doors, polish our own shoes, dust 
our own bibelots, and make messes on a chafing- 
dish when the cook is out; and let us do it gal- 
lantly. But let us not pretend that it is more 
civilized to do these things ourselves than to 
have them skilfully done for us. The prince in 
disguise makes the most charming beggar in 
the world, no doubt; but that is because — as all 

[63] 



MODES AND MORALS 



fairy-tales from the beginning of time have 
taught us — the prince wears his rags as if they 
were purple. And, to do that, he not only must 
once have worn purple, but must never forget 
the purple that he has worn. And to the argu- 
ment that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I 
say, only reply that that seems to me to be no 
reason why all should wear rags. 

Until every one is too good to be a parlor- 
maid, let us open our own doors, if we must — 
provided we do It according to the great tradi- 
tion of door-opening; but how can we do it 
according to the great tradition if we abolish 
parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great 
tradition? And, whatever the simpliflers say, 
there Is no doubt that, as yet, there are, to one 
person who is too good for door-opening, ten 
persons who are by no means good enough for 
it. I have never been able to imagine just how 
the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver 
the aristocracy of earth into the democracy of 
Heaven. To be sure, it is not my affair. But at 
least one can have, this side the grave, little 
patience with the altruisms of the Procrust- 
eans. They merely wish to make each of us an 
incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had 
thought the German universities, if they had 
done nothing else, had blown that bubble ! 

A friend of mine asked me the other day if 
I did not feel degraded to be at the mercy of 
servants; humiliated by knowing that they 

[64] 



CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE 



could perform domestic tasks better than I, and 
could take advantage of that fact. I confess it 
had never occurred to me. If my cook felt 
degraded by being unable to talk French, I 
should think her a silly snob. Are we not all, 
economically, at one another's mercy? Of what 
does enthusiastic living of the ''simple" life 
make us Independent, save of a few hard- 
learned and precious lessons of taste? The 
successful housewife is the one who has suc- 
ceeded in imitating perfectly several trained 
servants. But the criterion is still the trained 
servant. The distinguished beggar is the one 
who wears his rags as if they were purple. But, 
to appreciate him, we must know the look of 
purple rightly worn. The admirable vegetarian 
eats his shredded wheat as if It were caviare. 
But where would be the beauty of his perform- 
ance were not someone, somewhere, eating 
caviare as If It were shredded wheat? 



[6s] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

IT Is odd how words recur. There has been 
more talk about culture, among educated 
people in America, during the last months, 
than there had been for years. To be sure, the 
culture discussed since August, 1914, has been 
German Kultur; but that does not matter. We 
have actually been talking about culture once 
more; rehabilitating It, if only for the sake of 
denying that the Germans, by and large, have a 
monopoly of anything so good. To some of us, 
this recurrence of a word so long tahu is wel- 
come — and as side-splittingly funny as it is 
welcome. For the fact is that for twenty years 
— ever since Matthew Arnold went out of 
fashion — to speak of culture has meant that 
one did not have it. The only people who have 
talked about it have been the people who have 
thought you could get it at Chautauquas. To 
use the word damned you in the eyes of the 
knowing. Now I have always, privately and 
humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word 
should go out of the best vocabularies; for 
when you lose an abstract term, you are very 
apt to lose the thing it stands for. Indeed, it 
has seemed only too clear that we were doing 
all in our power to lose both the word and the 
[66] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

thing. I fancy we ought to be grateful to the 
Germans for getting "culture'^ on to all the 
editorial pages of the country; though I admit 
it sometimes seems as If the Germans bore out 
the rule that only those people talk about it 
who have It not. I should really like to make a 
plea for the temporary reversal of the rule. 
Indeed, I think we are getting to a point where 
we are so little "cultured'* that we can really 
afford to talk about it. When the plutocrat 
goes bankrupt, he may once more, with de- 
cency, mention the prices of things. Culture has 
ceased to be a passionate American preoccupa- 
tion. Perhaps we shall not offend modesty if 
we use the word once more. 

Now there are some who, believing that all 
is for the best in the best of possible worlds, 
and that to-morrow is necessarily better than 
to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing 
we shall Infallibly be found to have more of It 
than we had a generation since; and that If we 
can be shown not to have more of It, It can be 
shown not to be worth seeking. Having, my- 
self, a congenital case of agoraphobia, I 
habitually say nothing to the professional 
optimists in the public square. The wilderness 
is a good place to cry in; the echoes are 
magnificent. So I shall not attempt to deprive 
any one of Candlde's happy conviction. If any 
person is kind enough to listen, I will simply 
ask him to contemplate a few facts with me. 

[67] 



MODES AND MORALS 



No one will be too optimistic, I fancy, to grant 
that there are proportionally fewer Americans 
who care about culture — and who know the 
real thing when they see it — than there were 
one or two generations ago. Contact with "the 
best that has been thought and said in the 
world" is not desired by so large a proportion 
of the community as it was. That there are 
new and parvenu branches of learning, furi- 
ously followed, I, on my part, shall not attempt 
to deny. But culture Is another matter. Perhaps 
the sociologists can show that this is a good 
thing. I do not ask any one to deplore any- 
thing. I only ask the well-disposed to examine 
the change that has come over the spirit of 
our American dream. 

If I were asked to give, off hand, the causes 
of the gradual extirpation of culture among us, 
I should name the following: 

1. The increased hold of the democratic fal- 
lacy on the public mind. 

2. The influx of a racially and socially in- 
ferior population. 

3. Materialism In all classes. 

4. The Idolatry of science. 

Only one of these Is purely Intellectual; two 
might almost be called political. In point of 
fact, all four are interwoven. 

I should be insultingly trite if I proceeded 
here to expound the fallacy of the historic 
statement that all men are born free and equal. 
[68] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

We have all known for a long time that indi- 
vidual freedom and individual equality cannot 
co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jeffer- 
son (and may I express my doubts even of that 
inspired charlatan?) has really believed it. No 
one could believe it at the present day except 
the people who are flattered by it; and of people 
who are flattered by it, it is obviously not true. 
The democracy of the present day — like the 
aristocracy of another day — is fostered by the 
people whom it advantages; and the people 
whom it advantages are adding themselves, at 
the rate of a miUion a year, to our census lists. 
When even democracy has to reckon with the 
fact that its premises are all wrong, and that 
men are not born equal — that hierarchies are 
inherent in human kind regardless of birth or 
opportunity — it proceeds to do its utmost to 
equalize artificially; it becomes Procrustes. 
But will any one contend that Procrustes left 
people free? 

Now, what has this to do with culture? 
Simply this: that culture is not a democratic 
achievement, because culture is inherently snob- 
bish. Contact with "the best that has been 
thought and said in the world" makes people 
intellectually exclusive, and makes them draw 
distinctions. Those distinctions, seriously speak- 
ing, are not founded on social origins or great 
possessions; they are founded on states of mind. 
So long as democracy is simply a political mat- 

1 69] 



MODES AND MORALS 



ter, culture is left free to select its groups and 
proclaim its hierarchies. But it is characteristic 
of our democracy that political equality has 
not sufficed to it; the "I am as good as you 
are" formula has been flung out to every hori- 
zon. The people with whom it has become a 
mania insist that their equality with every one 
else in their range of vision is a moral, an in- 
tellectual, a social, as well as a political, equality. 
Let that formula prevail, and culture, with its 
eternal distinction-drawing, will naturally die. 
For contact with the best that has been thought 
and said in the world induces a mighty humility 
— and a mighty scorn of those who do not 
know enough to be humble before the Masters. 
They are an impersonal humility and an imper- 
sonal scorn — attitudes of the mind, both, not 
of the heart. But humility and scorn are 
both ruled, theoretically, out of the democratic 
court. 

The pure-bred American once cared for cul- 
ture, and no longer — to the same extent, at 
least — does. If any one asks why America (I 
use the word loosely, as meaning our United 
States), having always, since the Revolution, 
been a democracy, can have cared for so un- 
democratic a thing, the answer is simple. The 
democracy of our forefathers was a purely 
pragmatic affair. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence was framed by men living in a world 
where it was almost true enough to be work- 
able. Roughly speaking, in pioneer and colonial 

[70] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

days — wherever and whoever the pioneers and 
colonists may be — the community Is a democ- 
racy because It Is an aristocracy. In those 
grimmer worlds, the fittest do survive because 
there Is no Incubator process to keep the feeble 
going. A pioneer and colonial group, more- 
over, Is apt to be like-minded; people do not 
exile themselves In each other's company unless 
they want the same things. Minor differences 
of opinion are swallowed up In like major 
needs: you form coalition governments against 
savages and famine or a specially detested 
tyranny. In the modern "I am as good as you 
are'* sense, our ancestors were not democratic 
at all. They were democratic for their own 
special group, and a pragmatic truth misled 
them: — as, because we admire them, we are 
permitting It to mislead us. They were Brah- 
minical In their attitude to learning; they 
thought It supremely valuable, and they did not 
believe In — no Brahmin wants to believe In — a 
royal road to It, any more than they believed 
in a royal road to the salvation of the soul. 
They believed In Intellectual, as much as they 
did In spiritual, election; and they certainly did 
not think that politics could influence either. 
Up to the last generation or two, they looked 
upon the cultured man as a peculiarly favored 
person; and because culture (unlike beauty, let 
us say) depended to some extent on the effort 
of the Individual, they thought it fit to mention. 
Now there Is this about a pragmatic truth: 

[71! 



MODES AND MORALS 



like any other invention of the devil, it 
smooths the road for the lazy. If it did not 
smooth the road, it would not be, by pragmatic 
definition, truth. And the great bulk of us have 
found the "free and equal" statement such a 
help that, though we cannot pretend for a 
moment that it is true, we stick to it. The 
schoolboy sticks to it because it greases his 
oratory; the politician sticks to it because his 
constituents like the sound of it; the detrimen- 
tal sticks to it because it is his only apology. 
And, just as you cannot suppress a word with- 
out eventually suppressing the thing it stands 
for, so you cannot utter a statement forever 
without imbibing some of its poison. Even as 
our reasonable national pride turned into the 
spread-eagleism that Dickens and Mrs. Trol- 
lope caricatured, so the "free and equal" shib- 
boleth turned into the "I am as good as you 
are" formula. Why trouble about anything, if 
you were already lord of the world? At first, 
it was Europe we defied. What were the an- 
cient oligarchies, to impose on us their stan- 
dards, intellectual, social, or moral? We set 
up our own standards, because we were as 
good as any one else — and also because it was 
a little easier. 

Let me say before going further, that I am 
not blaming the lower classes alone for the 
extirpation of culture among us. The upper 
classes are equally responsible — if, indeed, not 

[72] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

even more to blame. We have become materi- 
alistic: our very virtues are more materialistic 
than they were. It is forgivable in the poor 
man to be materialistic; for unless he has 
bread to keep his body alive, he will presently 
have no soul to cherish. Materialism is less 
pardonable in the man who always knows where 
his next meal is coming from. He, if you like, 
does have time to worry about his soul. None 
the less, he worries about it very little. There 
used to be a good deal of fun poked at settle- 
ment-workers who tried to read Dante and 
Shakespeare to slum-dwellers. I am not sure 
that those misguided youths and maidens who 
first carried Dante and Shakespeare into the 
slums were not right as to substance, however 
wrong they were as to sequence. The only 
morally decent excuse for wanting to have a 
little more money than you actually need to 
feed and clothe your family, is your ambition 
to have a little mental energy to spend on 
things not of the body. The ultimate tragedy 
of the slums is that, in slum conditions, one 
can scarcely think, from birth to death, of any- 
thing but the body. The upper-class people 
who think of pleasing their palates instead of 
relieving hunger, of being in the fashion in- 
stead of covering their nakedness, are no more 
civilized than the slum-dwellers. They are apt, 
it is true, to become more so ; for it is a strange 
fact that a family can seldom be rich through 

[73] 



MODES AND MORALS 



several generations without discovering some 
aesthetic truths. And aesthetic truths lead to 
moral perceptions. You cannot with impunity 
fill your ears with good music, your eyes with 
good painting and sculpture and architecture. 
Something happens to you, after a time, no 
matter how vulgar you may be. But wealth is 
very fluctuating in our country; and several gen- 
erations of it are not often seen. The people 
who are now rich are generally people whose 
grandfathers and great-grandfathers were fight- 
ing for sheer existence. So we have the spectacle 
of the dominant plutocrats (no one will deny 
that plutocracy is the order of the day, both 
here and in Europe) either mindful them- 
selves of the struggle for existence, or in a 
state of having only just forgotten it. They are 
not going to push their children into a race for 
intangible goods. And the more we recruit 
from immigrants who bring no personal tradi- 
tions with them, the more America is going to 
ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose 
consuming desire is either for food or for 
motor-cars is going to care about culture, or 
even know what it is. And it is another mis- 
fortune of our over-quickened social evolution 
that the middle classes do not stay middle- 
class. They climb to wealth, or sink to indi- 
gence. Neither that quick rise nor that quick 
fall is a period in which to cherish their own 
or their children's intellects. 

[74] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

Both from above and below, then, our col- 
leges and schools have felt the hostile pressure. 
Colleges are, on the one hand, jeered at for 
doing their business badly, and, on the other, 
accused of being too difficult. We are always 
hearing that college is of no earthly use to a 
man except as he learns there to rub up against 
other men. We are always hearing, also, that 
the college curriculum is a cruel strain on the 
average boy or girl. On one score or another, 
the colleges are always being attacked; and the 
attack usually includes the hint that the real 
test of a "college education" is not the intrinsic 
value, but its success or failure in preparing 
the youth for something that has nothing to 
do with learning. Will it be of social or finan- 
cial use to him? If not, why make sacrifices to 
get it? Far be it from me to assert that the 
intellectual flame never burns in the breast of 
collegiate youth! But I do believe it provable 
that there is far less tendency to regard learn- 
ing as a good in itself, and far more tendency 
to cheat scholarship, if possible, in the interest 
of some other thing held good, than there was 
two generations ago. Ignorance of what real 
learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; 
materialism, and a consequent intellectual lax- 
ity — ^both of these have done destructive work 
in the colleges. 

The education of younger children is in like 
case. We put them into kindergartens where 

[75] 



MODES AND MORALS 



their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we 
can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that 
were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian 
slums ; or we send them to outdoor schools and 
give them prizes for sleeping. Every one 
knows what a fight the old universities have 
had to put up to keep their entrance standards 
at all. With the great new army of state uni- 
versities admitting students from the public 
schools without examination, because they 
themselves are part of the big public-school 
system, how can it be otherwise? 

Now the patriotic American may see — and 
rightly enough — in the public-school system 
which includes a college training, a relic of the 
desperate desire of our forefathers that educa- 
tion, as a major good, should be within the 
reach of all and sundry. But even the patriotic 
American must see another impulse at work: 
the impulse to put the college intellectually, as 
well as financially, within the reach of all. The 
colleges must not set up standards for them- 
selves that the average boy or girl, from the 
ordinary school, cannot reach without difficulty, 
because that is undemocratic. 

Now I know as well as other people that it 
is positively harder to get into our old universi- 
ties to-day than it was in our fathers' day. But 
granted the enormously increased facilities for 
preparation all over the land, it Is not rela- 
tively anything like so hard. Certainly, once in, 

[76] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

it IS possible to get through the college course 
with less work than ever before. In the first 
place, there is a much wider choice of subjects 
on which a boy can get his degree: his tastes 
are consulted as they never used to be. If he 
does not want to endure the discipline of 
Greek, he can get an A.B. at every college in 
the country — except Princeton — without know- 
ing a word of Greek. Even at Princeton, he 
can take a Litt.B. and let Greek forever alone.* 
He can study sociology, or Spanish, or physical 
culture, or nearly anything he likes. I have 
even heard that in one of our state universities 
there is a department of hat-trimming, which 
contributes its quota to the courses for a (pre- 
sumably feminine) academic degree. 

It may be objected at this point that the 
fluctuations of colleges have nothing to do with 
our standards of culture. I think they have, a 
great deal. No one will deny that culture can 
be got elsewhere, or that colleges do not suffice 
in themselves to give it. But if colleges do 
not consider themselves custodians of culture, 
warders and cherishers of the flame, they have 
no reason for existence. It is a platitude that 

* I have been told, since writing this essay, that the Univer- 
sity of Chicago demands a modicum of Greek for the A. B. de- 
gree. The Catholic University does the same. And it is only 
fair to say, also, that, since this essay'was written, Princeton has 
abdicated her well-nigh unique position. It will hereafter be 
possible to acquire the Princeton A. B. without knowing alpha 
from omega. 

[77] 



MODES AND MORALS 



business men consider college a worthless pre- 
paration for business life— ^save as a young 
man may have laid up there treasure for him- 
self in the shape of valuable "connections." 
Even the conception of college as a four years' 
paradise intervening before the hell of an 
active struggle for existence, does not touch 
upon the original reason for universities' being 
at all. Universities were invented for the sake 
of bringing their fortunate students into con- 
tact with the precious lore of the world, there 
garnered and kept pure. There was no idea on 
the part of their founders that every one 
would or could partake of academic benefits. 
The social scheme would not originally have 
allowed that; still less would the conception of 
the public intellect have admitted the notion. 
Every one was not supposed to be congenitally 
qualified for intimacy with the best that has 
been thought and said in the world. They had 
no notion, until very recently, of so changing 
the terms of that Intimacy that every one 
might think he could have it. Learning, culture, 
were not to be adulterated so that any mental 
digestive process whatsoever could take them 
in. 

But now, in America, there Is a tendency 
that way. If a boy does not feel a pre-estab- 
lished harmony between his soul and the hu- 
manities, then give him an academic degree on 
something with which his soul will be in pre- 

[78] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

established harmony. And if there is no pre- 
estabHshed harmony between his soul and any 
form of learning, then create institutions that 
will give him a degree with no learning to 
speak of at all. I do not mean to deny that 
many of our virtually valueless colleges were 
founded in the pathetic inherited conviction 
that learning and culture were too great goods 
not to be accessible to all who cared passion- 
ately for them. But I do believe that the rever- 
ence for learning and culture has been largely 
replaced by a conviction that anything which 
has so great a reputation as a college degree 
must be put within the reach of all, even at the 
risk of making its reputation a farce. The 
privileged have been unwilling that their chil- 
dren should be made to work; the unprivileged 
have been unwilling that their children should 
see anything of good repute, anything with a 
prestige value, denied to them. We have all 
demanded a royal road to a thing to which 
there is no royal road. The expensive schools 
lead their pupils from kindergarten to nature- 
study and eurhythmies, with basket-work and 
gymnastics thrown in ; the public schools follow 
them as closely as they can. Of real training of 
the mind there is very little in any school. The 
rich do not want their children overworked; 
the poor want a practical result for their 
children's fantastically long school hours. So 
cjpmestic science comes in for girls, and. can- 

[79] 



MODES AND MORALS 



pentering for boys. Anything to make it easy, 
on the one hand; anything to make a universal 
standard possible, on the other. 

Take one example only: the attitude towards 
Greek. There are two arguments against teach- 
ing our children Greek: one, that it Is too 
hard; the other, that It is useless. The mere 
fact that public opinion has drummed Greek 
out of court as an inevitable part of a college 
curriculum shows that these arguments have 
been potent. No person who could be influ- 
enced by either has the remotest conception of 
the meaning or the value of culture. Culture 
has never renounced a thing because it was 
difficult, or because it did not help people to 
make money. And the mere fact that Greek is 
no longer supposed by the vast majority of 
parents to be of any "use" — even as a matter 
of reputation — to their sons, shows that the 
old standards of culture have changed. The 
larger number of our public schools no longer 
teach Greek at all; a great many private 
schools have to make special arrangements for 
pupils who wish to study it. And the attitude 
towards Greek is only a sign of our democratic, 
materialistic times. 

Now I have done with the colleges. I have 
dealt with them at all only by way of hinting 
that they have been so democratized that cul- 
ture means, even to its avowed exponents, 
something different from what It has ever 

[80] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

meant before. May I speak for one moment 
explicitly of the public schools? For we must 
trace all this back to the source — must begin 
with the ostensible homes of "culture" and 
follow up the stream to the latent public con- 
sciousness. Each class that comes into college 
has read fewer and fewer of what are called 
the classics of English literature. An astonish- 
ing number of boys and girls have read nothing 
worth reading except the books that are in the 
entrance requirements. An increasing propor- 
tion of the sons and daughters of the prosper- 
ous are positively illiterate at college age. 
They cannot spell; they cannot express them- 
selves grammatically; and they are inclined to 
think that it does not matter. General laxity, 
and the adoption of educational fads which 
play havoc with real education, are largely 
responsible. In the less fortunate classes, the 
fact seems to be that the public schools are so 
swamped by foreigners that all the teachers 
can manage to do is to teach the pupils a little 
workable English. Needless to say, the profes- 
sion of the public-school teacher has become 
less and less tempting to people who are really 
fit for it. 

It is not only in the great cities that the 
immigrant population swamps the schoolroom. 
An educated woman told me, not long since, 
that there was no school in the place where 
she lived — one of our oldest New England 
[8i] 



MODES AND MORALS 



towns — to which she could send her boy. The 
town could not support a private school for 
young children; and the public school was out 
of the question. I had been brought up to 
believe that public schools in old New England 
towns were very decent places ; and I asked her 
why. The answer made it clear. Three fourths 
of the school-children were Lithuanians, and a 
decently bred American child could simply 
learn nothing in their classes. They had to be 
taught English, first of all; they approached 
even the most elementary subjects very slowly; 
and — natural corollary — the teachers them- 
selves were virtually illiterate. Therefore she 
was teaching her boy at home until he could 
go to a preparatory school. Fortunately, she 
was capable of doing it; but there are many 
mothers who cannot ground their children in 
the languages and sciences. A woman who 
could not would have had to watch her child 
acquiring a Lithuanian accent and the locutions 
of the slum. 

An isolated case is never worth much. But 
one has only to consider conditions at large to 
see that this has everything to make it typical. 
One has only to look at any official record of 
immigration, any chart of distribution of popu- 
lation by races, to see how the old American 
stock is being numerically submerged. If you 
do not wish to look at anything so dull as 
statistics, look at the comic papers. A fact 
[ 82 1 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

does not become a stock joke until It is pretty 
well visible to the average man. Our fore- 
fathers cared immensely for education; they 
felt themselves humble before learning; and 
their schools followed, soon and sacredly, upon 
their churches. They stood in awe of the real 
thing; and they had no illusions as to the ease 
of the scholar's path. They legislated for their 
schools solemnly, and if not with complete 
wisdom, always at least with accurate ideals. 
Educational (like all other) legislation now- 
adays is largely in the hands of illiterate 
people, and the illiterate will take good care 
that their illiteracy is not made a reproach to 
them. If any one chooses to say that culture 
must always be in the hands of an oligarchy, 
and that the oligarchy has not been touched, 
I will only ask him to consider the pupils and 
the teaching in most private schools. In the 
end, prestige values are going to tell; and the 
vast bulk of our population will see to It that 
the prestige values are not absolutely unattain- 
able to them. The great fortunes have made 
their way to the top — ^yes, really to the top. In 
many cases there has been time for a quick 
veneer of grammar to be laid over their origi- 
nal English. In many cases there has not; and 
no one cares. The custodians of culture cannot 
afford to care; for their custody must either 
be endowed or be forsaken. 

Oh, yes, there are a few Brahmins left; but 

I831 



MODES AND MORALS 



one has only to look at the marriages of any 
given season to see what is becoming of the 
purity of the Brahmin caste. The Brahmins 
themselves are beginning to see that they are 
lost unless they compound with the material- 
ists, and make or marry money — or increase, 
by aid of the materialists, what they have 
inherited. In what New England village, now, 
is the minister or the scholar looked up to as 
a fount of municipal wisdom because he is a 
learned man? Is he a *'good mixer'*? That is 
what they ask : I have heard them. Once it was 
possible in America for a poor man to hope to 
gain for his children, if they deserved it, the 
life of the intellect and of the spirit. Now it no 
longer is; for the poor themselves have defiled 
the fount. They are a different kind of poor, 
that is all; and they have become an active and 
discontented majority, with hands that pick 
and steal. When they no longer need to pick 
and steal, they carry their infection higher and 
give it as a free gift. And they have been aided 
by the Brahmins themselves; who, having dab- 
bled in sociology pour se desoeuvrer, and then for 
charity's sake, are now finding that sociology 
Is a grim matter of life and death, and endow 
chairs of it — as if one should endow chairs of 
self-preservation. But self-preservation is not 
culture and never will be; and no study of the 
manners and customs of savages or slums can 
call itself "contact with the best that has been 
thought and said in the world.'* 

I84] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

We owe, too, I think, a great deal of our 
cultural deterioration (which I admit is a vil- 
lainous phrase) to science. Science has come in 
with a rush, and is at present — why deny it? — 
on top. "Scientific" is a word to charm with, 
even though it has already had time to be 
degraded. If Mrs. Eddy had called her 
bargain-counter Orientalism anything but "sci- 
ence," would she have drawn so many follow- 
ers? Science has done great things for us; it 
has also pushed us hopelessly back. For, not 
content with filling its own place, it has tried 
to supersede everything else. It has challenged 
the super-eminence of religion; it has turned 
all philosophy out of doors except that which 
clings to Its skirts; It has thrown contempt on 
all learning that does not depend on It; and It 
has bribed the skeptics by giving us Immense 
material comforts. To the plea, "Man shall 
not live by bread alone, but by every word 
which proceedeth out of the mouth of God," 
It has retorted that no word proceeds authen- 
tically out of the mouth of God save what it 
has Issued In Its own translations. It is more 
rigorous and more exclusive than the Index of 
the Roman Church. The Inquisition never did 
anything so oppressive as to put all men, Inno- 
cent or guilty, Into a laboratory. Science cares 
supremely for physical things. If It restricted 
itself to the physical world. It would be toler- 
able: we could shut ourselves away with our 
souls in peace. But it must control the soul as 

[85] 



MODES AND MORALS 



well as the body : it Insists on reducing all emo- 
tions, however miraculous and dear, to a ques- 
tion of nerve-centres. There has never been 
tyranny like this. 

Now I do not mean to say that all scientists 
despise culture. That would be silly and untrue. 
But the "scientific" obsession has changed all 
rankings in the intellectual world. The insidi- 
ousness of science lies In Its claim to be not a 
subject, but a method. You could ignore a sub- 
ject: no subject Is all-inclusive. But a method 
can plausibly be applied to anything within the 
field of consciousness. Small wonder that the 
study of literature turns Into philology, the 
study of history into archaeology, and the study 
of morals and aesthetics Into physical psychol- 
ogy. With the finer appeals of philosophy and 
poetry and painting and natural beauty, science 
need not meddle; because about their direct 
effect on the thought and wills of men It can 
say nothing valuable. You cannot determine 
the value of a Velasquez by putting your finger 
on the pulse of the man who is looking at it; 
or the value of Amiens Cathedral by register- 
ing the vibration of his internal muscles; or of 
the Grand Caiion of the Colorado by declaring 
that all perception of beauty is a function of 
sex. Nor does it matter very much, at the 
moment, to the enraptured reader or observer 
that such and such a work of art was the 
logical result of a given set of conditions. The 
[861 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 



point IS that it is there; and that it works 
potently upon us in ways which we can scarce 
phrase. Culture puts us disinterestedly in com- 
munication with the distilled and sifted lore of 
the world. Science is in comparison a preju- 
diced affair — prejudiced because It seeks always 
to bring things back to literal and physical 
explanations. Far be it from me to deny that 
geology, biology, physics, have given us un- 
apprehended vistas down which to stray — 
only, strictly speaking, it forbids the straying. 
The moment the layman's imagination begins 
to profit, begins to get real exhilaration from 
scientific discoveries, it contributes something 
unwelcome to science. Science has its own stern 
value; in the end we are all profoundly affected 
by its gains in the field of fact. One's quarrel 
is not with science as such, but with science as 
demanding an intellectual and spiritual hegem- 
ony. With nothing less than hegemony, how- 
ever, will science be content. 

Now if It is not yet clear what effect all this 
must have on culture, a few words may make 
it clearer. The great danger of the scientific 
obsession Is not the destruction of all things 
that are not science, but the slow infection of 
those things. If the laboratory Is your real 
test, then most philosophies and all art are no 
good. The scientists are not good philosophers, 
and they are not good artists; and if science is 
to rule everywhere, we must shelve philosophy 

1 87] 



MODES AND MORALS 



and art, or else take them into the laboratory. 
I need not point out what has become of litera- 
ture under a scientific regime. We all know 
the hopeless fiction that is created by the scien- 
tific method; fiction that banks on its anec- 
dotal accuracy and has in it no spiritual truth. 
Literature is simply a different game: you do 
not get the greatest literary truth by the lab- 
oratory method. Art is not reducible to science, 
because science takes no account of the special 
truth which is beauty, of the special truth which 
is moral imagination. 

It is not only by the laboratory method that 
our fiction has been ruined: a great many of 
our writers of fiction are not up to the labor- 
atory method. But all our fiction has been 
harmed by the prevalent idea that no fiction is 
any good which is not done according to the 
laboratory method, and that even fiction which 
attempts that method is of little value in com- 
parison with a card-catalogue. There were some 
snobs who were not affected by the democratic 
fallacy; but even the snobs have been affected 
by scientific scorn. 

I may have seemed to be showing rather the 
reasons for the extirpation of culture among us 
than the fact of the extirpation. Perhaps that 
is not the best way to go to work. But the 
actual evidence is so multitudinously at hand 
that it was hardly worth while beginning with 
solemn proofs of the fact. In all branches of 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

art and learning we have a cult of the modern. 
Modern languages rank Latin and Greek in 
our schools and colleges; practical and "voca- 
tional" training is displacing the rudiments of 
learning in all of our public and many of our 
private institutions for the teaching of the 
young; the books admitted to the lists of "liter- 
ature" include many that never have been and 
never will be literature. I found, a few years 
ago, the following books on a list from which 
students of English were allowed to choose 
their reading for the course — this, in one of 
the old and respectable high schools of Massa- 
chusetts, not twenty miles from Boston: Sol- 
diers of Fortune y Pushing to the Front, Greif en- 
stein, Doctor Latimer, The Prisoner of Zenda, 
The Honorable Peter Stirling, The First Violin, 
and "any of the works of Stewart Edward 
White." These, and many others, may be, in 
their way, good reading, but there is no excuse 
for offering them to the young student of Eng- 
lish as examples of "literature." 

Standards of beauty and truth are no longer 
rigidly held up. In philosophy we have produced 
pragmatism ; in art we have produced futurism 
— and what not, since then? — in literature we 
have produced the pathologic and the economic 
novel, and no poetry worth speaking of. The 
"grand style" has gone out; and the classics 
are back numbers. Our children do not even 
speak good English; and no one minds. They 

[89] 



MODES AND MORALS 



cannot be bored with Scott and Dickens; they 
cannot be bored with poetry at all. And why 
should they, when their fathers and mothers 
are reading Laddie and The Sick-a-Bed Lady, 
and their clergymen are preaching about The 
Inside of the Cup — or the latest work deal- 
ing with the slums by some one who was 
slum-born and slum-bred and Is proud of it? 
You can be slum-born and slum-bred and 
still achieve something worth while; but it is 
a stupid Inverted snobbishness to be proud of 
it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, 
it would be of a continued decent tradition 
back of one. The cultured person must have 
put in a great many years with nothing to show 
for it; his parents have usually put in a great 
many years, for him, for which they have 
nothing to show. There is nothing to show, 
until you get the complex result of the discip- 
lined and finished creature. "Culture" means a 
long receptivity to things of the mind and the 
spirit. There is no money in it; there is nothing 
striking in it; there is in it no flattery of our 
own time, or of the majority. 

Ours is a commercial age, in which most 
people are bent on getting money. That is a 
platitude. It is also, intellectually speaking, a 
materialistic age, when most of our intellectual 
power is given either to prophylaxis, or to 
industrial chemistry, or to the invention of 
physical conveniences — all ultimately concerned 

[90] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

with the body. Even the philanthropists deal 
with the soul through the body, and Chris- 
tianity has long since become "muscular.'* 
How, in such an age, can culture flourish — 
culture, which cares even more about the spirit 
than about the flesh? It was pointed out not 
long ago, in an Atlantic article, that many of 
our greatest minds have dwelt in bodies that 
the eugenists would have legislated out of 
existence. Many of the greatest saints found 
sainthood precisely in denying the power of the 
ailing flesh to restrict the soul. There is more 
in the great mystics than psychiatry will ever 
account for. But science, in spite of its vistas, 
is short-sighted. It talks in seons, but keeps its 
eye well screwed to the microscope. The geol- 
ogic ages are dealt with by pick and hammer 
and reduced to slides, and the lore of the stars 
has become a pure matter of mathematical 
formulae. Human welfare is a question of 
microbes. Neither pundit nor populace cares, 
at the present day, for perspectives. The past 
is discredited because it is not modern. Not to 
be modern is the great sin. 

So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his 
day, been modern. And surely even modernity 
is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we 
must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a 
dead lion than a living dog? And is it not a 
crime against human nature to consider negli- 
gible "the best that has been thought and said 

[91] 



MODES AND MORALS 



in the world"? It is only by considering it 
negligible that we can consent to let ourselves 
be overrun by the hordes of ignorance and 
materialism — the people (God save the 
mark!) of to-morrow. Let us stand, if we 
must, on practical grounds: the bird in the 
hand is worth two in the bush. As if our only 
guaranty that to-morrow would be tolerable 
were not precisely that it is sprung from a past 
that we know to have been, at many points, 
noble! It is pathetic to see people refusing to 
learn the lessons of history; it is a waste that 
no efficiency expert ought to permit. All learn- 
ing is a textbook which would save much time 
to him who works for the perfection of the 
world. But I begin to think that our age does 
not really care about perfection; and that it 
would rather make a thousand-year-old mistake 
than learn a remedy from history. So much the 
worse for to-morrow ! 

But meanwhile let us — those of us who 
can — see to it that the pre-eminent brains of 
other ages shall not have passed away in vain. 
M. Anatole France, in La Revolte des 
AngeSj has a good deal to say about the 
absurdity of a Jehovah who still believes in 
the Ptolemaic system. Well, the Ptolemaic sys- 
tem did not prevent the ancient world from 
giving us Greek theatres and Roman law, or 
England from giving us Magna Charta. We 
are still imitating Greek theatres (rather 

[92] 



THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE 

badly, I admit) In our stadia; Roman law 
is still, by and large, good enough for such 
an enlightened country as France; and Magna 
Charta — or Its equivalent — had to be there 
before we could have a Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. Our superior scientific knowledge 
has not given us our standards of beauty or 
justice or liberty. Let us take what the present 
offers — airplanes and all. But let us not throw 
away what other men, In other ages, have died 
for the sake of discovering. If the lore of the 
past is useless, there Is every chance — one must 
be very overweening indeed not to admit It — 
that the lore of our generation will be useless, 
too. Culture — whether you use the word Itself 
or find another term — means only a decent 
economy of human experience. You cannot 
Improve on things without keeping those things 
pretty steadily in mind. Otherwise you run the 
risk of wasting a lot of time doing something 
that has already been done. Any one, I think, 
will admit that. And It Is not a far step to the 
realization that on the whole It Is wise not to 
lose the past out of our minds. There Is no 
glory In being wiser than the original savage; 
there Is glory In being wiser than the original 
sage. But In order to be wiser than he, we must 
have a shrewd suspicion of how wise he was. 
By and large, without culture, that shrewd 
suspicion will nev€r be ours. 

[93] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 

NEVER, I fancy, has It been more true 
than it is today, that fiction reflects life. 
The best fiction has always given us a 
kind of precipitate of human nature — Don 
Quixote and Tom Jones are equally "true," 
and true, in a sense, for all time; but our 
modern books give us every quirk and turn of 
the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, If read 
at all, may be too "quaint" for words. And to 
any one who has been reading fiction for the 
last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that 
fashions in human nature have changed. 

My first novel was Jane Eyre; and at the 
age of eight, I fell desperately In love with 
Fairfax Rochester. No Instance could serve 
better to point the distance we have come. I 
was not an extraordinary little girl (except 
that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate 
In being permitted to encounter the classics in 
Infancy), and I dare say that If I had not met 
Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to 
some Imaginary gentleman of a quite different 
stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in 
love — had time and chance permitted — ^with 
V. V. or The Beloved Vagabond. But I 
doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer 

[94l 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



assume that it is the prime business of the 
female heart (at whatever age) to surrender 
itself completely to some man. Consequently, 
the men in the novels of today are not calcu- 
lated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering 
mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be 
taken, as modern tactics direct the assault. 

People are always telling us that fashions 
in women have changed: what seems to me 
almost more interesting is that fashions in men 
(the stable sex) have changed to match. The 
new woman (by which I mean the very new- 
est) would not fall in love with Mr. Roches- 
ter. It is therefore "up to" the novelists to 
create heroes whom the modern heroine will 
fall in love with. This, to the popular satis- 
faction, they have done. And not only in fiction 
have the men changed; in life, too, the men 
of to-day are quite different. I know, because 
my friends marry them. 

It is immensely interesting, this difference. 
One by one, the man has sloughed off his most 
masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. 
Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel 
with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitz- 
gerald (the only love of that incomparable 
woman. Lady Glencora Palliser), who break- 
fasted on curagao and pate de foie gras. No 
longer does Blanche Ingram declare, "An Eng- 
lish hero of the road would be the next best 
thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only 

(9Sl 



MODES AND MORALS 



be surpassed by a Levantine pirate." Blanche 
Ingram wants — and gets — the Humanitarian 
Hero : some one who has particular respect for 
convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite 
author is Tolstoi. He must qualify for the 
possession of her hand by long, voluntary resi- 
dence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral 
acres only if he has, concerning them, social- 
istic intentions. He must be too altruistic to 
kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to- 
date, he must refuse to eat them. He must 
never order "pistols and coffee" : his only per- 
mitted weapon is benevolent legislation. 

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop — 
"muscular Christianity" has at least taught us 
that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of 
condition, as he may any day have a street 
fight on his hands. And he should have the 
tongues of men and of angels. Gone is the 
inarticulate Guardsman — gone forever. The 
modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitz- 
gerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Roches- 
ter never heard of. He is ready to address any 
gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, 
until dawn. He is, preferably, personally un- 
conscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but 
he is by no means effeminate. He is a very 
complicated and interesting creature. Some 
mediaeval traits are discernible in him; but the 
eighteenth century would not have known him 
for human. 

[96] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



What has he lost, this hero, and what has 
he gained? How did it all begin? In life, 
doubtless, it began with a feminine change of 
taste. Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; 
and, I suspect, the peacock's tail, as much as 
the anthropoid ape's. Is destined to elimination. 
We women of to-day are distrustful of the 
peacock's tail. We are mortally afraid of being 
misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that 
the peacock's soul is not quite the thing. Never 
has there been among the feminine young more 
scientific talk about sex, and never among the 
feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. 
Before a young woman suspects that she wants 
to marry a young man, she has probably dis- 
cussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, 
white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The 
miracle — the everlasting miracle of Nature — 
IS that she should want, in these circumstances, 
to marry him at all. She probably does not, 
unless his views have been wholly to her satis- 
faction. And with those views, what has the 
perpetual glory of the peacock's tail to do? 

So much for life. In our English fiction, I 
am Inclined to believe that George Eliot began 
it with Daniel Deronda. But, In our own day, 
Meredith did more. Up to the time of Mere- 
dith, the dominant male was the fashionable 
hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, 
and Fairfax Rochester, and "Stunning" War- 
rington are as different as possible; but all of 

[97] 



MODES AND MORALS 



them, in their several ways, keep up one male 
tradition in fiction. It is within our own day 
that that tradition has entirely changed. Have 
you ever noticed how inveterately, in Mere- 
dith's novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual 
kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont can- 
not stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleet- 
wood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby 
Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little 
girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would 
have preferred any one of these gentlemen 
(yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but 
I dare say the event would have proved her 
wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies' 
choice was never doubtful to Meredith him- 
self. The soldier and the aristocrat cannot en- 
dure the test they are put to by the sympathetic 
male with a penchant for the enfranchised 
woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to accede to 
Aminta's taste for publicity; vain for Lord 
Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of 
Carinthia Jane: each has previously been con- 
victed of pride. 

Now, in an earlier day, no woman would 
have looked at a man who was not proud — 
who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, 
by which Lucifer fell, was the chief hall-mark 
of the gentleman. Moreover, In that earlier 
day, women did not expect their heroes to 
explain everything to them: a certain amount 
of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one 

[98] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



of the hall-marks of the gentleman. If a bit of 
mystery could be thrown in, so much the better. 
It gave her something to exercise her imagina- 
tion on. Think of the Byronic males — Conrad, 
Lara, and the rest! If they had told all, where 
would they have been? Think of Lovelace and 
HeathcHff and Darcy and Brian de Bols 
GuUbert ! 

Heroes, once, were always disdaining to 
speak, and spurning their foes. Nowadays, no 
hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures 
to spurn anyone — least of all, his foes. He is 
humble of heart and very loquacious. Mrs. 
Humphry Ward has inherited from George 
Eliot; and the latest heroes of Mr. Gals- 
worthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the 
children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, 
and Owain Wythan (of whom it is not ex- 
plicitly written that they had any others). 
They are humanitarian and democratic; they 
are ignorant of hatred; they are inclined to 
think the ill-born necessarily better than the 
well-born; and they are quite sure that women 
are superior to men. True, Mr. Galsworthy 
always seems to be looking backward ; he never 
forgets the ancient tradition that he is com- 
bating. His young aristocrats who eschew the 
ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in 
their case is ''its only reward." Perhaps that 
is why his novels always leave us with the 
medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. 

[99] 



MODES AND MORALS 



But take a handful of heroes elsewhere: the 
Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict "Dan- 
iel Smith," V. v., or even Coryston, the 
Socialist peer. Where, in a lot of them, do 
you find either pride or reticence In the old 
sense? Where, in any one of them, do you find 
the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet 
Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, 
or Elizabeth Bennett, have looked at with eyes 
of love? 

The "Satanic charm." The phrase Is out. 
Milton, I suspect, is responsible for the tradi- 
tion that has lasted so long, and Is now being 
broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan 
delightful, and our good Protestant novelists 
for a long time followed his lead, in that they 
gave their delightful men some of the Satanic 
traits. Proud they were and scornfully silent, 
as we have recalled; and conventional to the 
last degree. "Conventional," that is, In the 
stricter sense; by which It Is not meant that as 
portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as 
men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They 
were conventional In that they followed a con- 
vention; In that they were, to a large extent, 
predicable. They were jealous of their honor, 
and believed It vindicable by the duel; they had 
no doubt that good women were better than 
bad, and that pedigree In human beings was as 
important as pedigree In animals; and though 
they might be quixotic on occasion, they were 
not democratic pour deux sous. The barmaid 

[ lOO] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



was not their sister, nor the stevedore their 
brother. (The Satan of Paradise Lost, as we 
all remember, was a splendid snob.) 

Moreover, they were sophisticated — and not 
merely out of books. The Faust idea, having 
prevailed for many centuries, has at last been 
abandoned — and perhaps, our sober sense may 
tell us, rightly; but not so long ago there was 
still something more repellent to the female 
imagination about the man who chose not to 
know, than about the man who chose not to 
abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed 
always to be looking for a Tom Jones or a 
Roderick Random — we might be looking for 
a Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, 
when we found our hero, we expected to find 
him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather 
likes to give a man points — and often (in fic- 
tion, at least) has to. Meredith railed against 
the "veiled virginal dolF' as heroine. Well: 
our heroines now are never veiled virginal 
dolls; but sometimes our heroes are. Lancelot 
has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I 
suspect that there is a literary law of compen- 
sation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg to the 
contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a 
veiled virginal doll somewhere in a really tak- 
ing romance. Perhaps it is fair that the sterner 
sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by 
the hearthstone, while women make the grand 
tour. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not 

[ lOI ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



referring particularly to that knowledge which 
any man is better without, but to the Odyssean 
experience which, in their respective measures, 
heroes were wont to have behind them: 

*And saw the cities, and the counsels knew 

Of many men, and many a time at sea 
Within his heart he bore calamity.* 

They had at least seen the towns and the 
minds of men, and their morals were the less 
likely to be upset by a conventional assault 
upon them. Does any one chance to remember, 
I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his "damna- 
tion" by his first experience of a Chopin noc- 
turne? It would have taken more than a 
Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned 
heroes do something that he did not wish to. 
They knew something of society, and ergo of 
women; they had experienced, directly or 
vicariously, human romance; and they had 
read history. Nowadays, they are apt to know 
little or nothing — to begin with— of society, 
women, or romance, except what may be got 
from brand-new books on sociology; and they 
pride themselves on knowing no history. His- 
tory, with its eternal stresses and selections, is 
nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes now- 
adays must be democratic or they die. It is an 
age of complete faith in the superiority of the 
lower classes — the swing of the pendulum, no 
[ 102] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the 
lower classes morally and aesthetically negli- 
gible. ^'Privilege" Is as detestable now In mat- 
ters of Intellect and breeding as In matters of 
finance and politics. The man with the muck- 
rake has got past the office into the drawing- 
room. If your hero has the bad luck not to 
have been born in the slums, he must at least 
have the wit to take up his habitation there as 
soon as he comes of age. We have learned that 
riches are corrupting, but (except In the special 
sense of vice-commlsslon reports) we have not 
yet learned that poverty is rather more cor- 
rupting than wealth. 

Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, 
or aesthetic, is now the deadly sin. If we are 
sophisticated, we may not be good enough for 
Ellis Island. And there goes another of the 
hall-marks of the gentleman as he was once 
known to fiction. Our hero in old days might 
not have condescended to the glittering assem- 
blies of fashion, but there was never any doubt 
that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, 
have been king of his company as soon as he 
entered the room. He might have been hard 
up, but his necktie would not have been "a 
black sea holding for life a school of fat white 
fish." He might have been lonely or gloomy, 
but he would not have been diffident, and he 
would never, never, never have "blinked" at 
the heroine. "My godlike friend had carelessly 

[103] 



MODES AND MORALS 



put his hair-brush Into the butter," says Asti- 
cot, at the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. 
Now in picaresque novels, we were always 
meeting people who did that sort of thing; but 
they were not gentlemen. Whereas, the Be- 
loved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite 
his ten years' abeyance, finds the countess quite 
ready to marry him. She does not marry him 
In the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to 
feel that there was something lacking in her 
because Paragot's manners at tea did not 
please her. The hero of old had what used to 
be called "a sense of fitness," and a saving sense 
of humor, which combined to prevent his enter- 
ing a ballroom as John the Baptist. The same 
lucky combination would have prevented him — 
in literature, at least — from wooing the mil- 
lionaire's child with dusty commonplaces of the 
Higher Criticism or jeremiads against the 
daughters of Heth. But perhaps millionaires' 
children today take that sort of thing for 
manners. To the argument that a performance 
of the kind takes courage, one can only reply 
that, judging from the enthusiasm with which 
the preaching hero is received by the heroine, 
it apparently does not. And in any case, the 
hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially 
constitutes courage to deserve any credit for It. 
Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy's 
men, he perceives, with some Inherited sense, 
that his kind of thing is not likely to be wel- 
[ 104] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



corned; and then he goes sadly and sternly 
away, leaving the girl to accept a wooer with 
more technique. But usually he cuts out every- 
body. For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, 
now, is the desire to reform his own class out 
of all recognition. 

Women, as we know, have long wanted to 
be talked to as if they were men; and the 
result is that heroines now let themselves be 
lectured at in a way that very few men would 
endure. Alison Parr marries the Rev. John 
Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have mar- 
ried V. V. if he had lived. Well: Clara 
Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and 
Carinthia Jane married Owain Wythan, and 
Aminta married Matey Weyburn. 

I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. 
That, I can give my word of honor, I am not. 
It is well that we have come to realize that 
there are some adventures which, in them- 
selves, add no lustre to a man's name. It Is 
well that we take thought for the lower strata 
of humanity — though our actual reforms, I 
fancy, show their authors as taking thought 
not for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly 
brutality, or the indifference which is negative 
brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; 
and certainly we do not particularly sympa- 
thize with Thackeray shedding tears as he 
went away from his publishers because they 
had obliged him to save Pendennis's chastity. 

[losl 



MODES AND MORALS 



That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis, 
would surely not have been made any less 
dreadful by being permitted to seduce Fanny 
Bolton. 

It is right to think of the poor; it is right to 
bend our energies, as citizens, to the economic 
bettering of their lot. No one could sanely 
regret our doing so. But there is always danger 
in saying the thing which is not, and in pre- 
tending that because some virtues have hith- 
erto not been recognized, the virtues that have 
been recognized are no good. One sympathizes 
with Towneley (in that incomparable novel 
The Way of All Flesh) when Ernest asks him: 

" *Don't you like poor people very much 
yourself?' 

"Towneley gave his face a comical but good- 
natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and 
decidedly, 'No, no, no,' and escaped. 

"Of course, some poor people were very 
nice, and always would be so, but as though 
scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he 
saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and 
that between the upper and lower classes there 
was a gulf which amounted practically to an 
impassable barrier." 

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not 
live longer and write more novels. But in re- 
gretting him, we shall do well to remember 
that though publication was delayed until some 
time after the author's death, the bulk of The 

[io6] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



Way of All Flesh was written in the '70's. 
The Way of All Flesh is not sympathetic to 
the contemporary mood; it is one of those 
books so much ahead of its time (except per- 
haps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has 
not yet caught up with it. It was doomed in- 
evitably to an interval of oblivion. The case 
reminds one of Richard Feverel. 

Only in one way is The Way of All Flesh 
quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well 
of the prostitute that he marries her. On the 
other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, 
which is not contemporary. I do not mean that 
the hero's marrying her is especially in the 
literary fashion, but his thinking well of her 
IS. You will notice that in our moral fever we 
do not leave the prostitute out of our novels — 
no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as 
of old. Only now, instead of being entangled 
with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; 
and she loves him for It. Perhaps this is what 
happens nowadays In real life. I do not pretend 
to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy 
the only kind of person who could invent the 
contemporary plot Is the kind who would live 
it. The wildest imaginings of the people who 
are made differently would hardly stretch to 
it. And not only does the hero find himself 
immensely touched by the tragedy of the 
disreputable woman — which is, after all, in 
certain cases plausible enough — he burns to 

[107] 



MODES AND MORALS 



introduce his fiancee to her. Now that, again, 
may be life — Mr. Winston Churchill, for 
example, should know better than I — but it is 
certainly a world with the sense of values gone 
wrong. And when we have lost our sense of 
values, we shall presently lose the values as 
well. The girl herself is often to blame: did 
not the fiancee of Simon de Gex go of her own 
initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come 
away to renounce him, convinced that the 
animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, 
emphatically, she was not. But then, as we 
know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he 
cannot keep his head with circus-people about; 
and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke 
have his little foibles by all means; but even 
Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled 
darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one 
side of her face having been nearly clawed off) 
and then go with her into city missionary work. 
Yet I do not believe it Is really Mr. Locke's 
fault. The public at present loves as a sister 
the woman with a past; and loves city mission- 
ary work, if possible, more. 

The fact is that with all our Imitation of 
Meredith — and every one who is not imitating 
Tolstoi* is imitating Meredith — he has failed 
to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions 
blindly — except one. We have emancipated our 
women and emasculated our men; we have cast 
down the mighty from their seats and exalted 

[io8] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



them of low degree; we have learned all the 
Radical shibboleths and say them for our 
morning prayers; and we have faced the fact 
of sex so squarely that we can hardly see any- 
thing else. But we have not learned his saving 
hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sin- 
clair has admirably pointed out in her study of 
the three Brontes that Charlotte Bronte 
was exceedingly modern in her detestation of 
sentimentality. Modern she may have been — 
with Meredith; but not modern with the 
present novelists, for they are almost too senti- 
mental to be endured. And there is the whole 
trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for 
being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how 
does It better the case to be sentimental, In- 
stead, over the heroine of The Promised 
Land? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much 
nicer person, if not half so clever. She may 
have snivelled a good deal, but she was capable 
of loving some one else better than herself. 

Of course, I have cited only a few instances 
— those that happened to come most easily to 
mind. But let any reader of fiction run over 
mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and 
see If the substitutions I have named have not 
pretty generally taken place. Has not pride 
given way to humility, reticence to glibness, 
class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the 
code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, 
and honor In the old sense to a burning pas- 
[ 109] 



MODES AND MORALS 



sion for reform — "any old" reform? Do not 
these men lead us into the heterogeneous com- 
pany of the unclassed of both sexes — and ask 
us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has 
not the world of fiction changed in the last 
twenty years ? The hero in old days sometimes 
fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But 
we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his 
side against the law. Now, the hero does not, 
perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but 
he is always passionately on the side of the 
people whom laws were devised to protect the 
respectable from. The scientific tendency to 
consider that aristocracy consists merely in 
freedom from certain physical taints has per- 
meated fiction. "Is not one man as good as 
another?" asked the demagogue. "Of course 
he is, and a great deal better!" repHed the 
excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the 
thick of a popular mania for thinking all the 
undesirables "a good deal better." The modern 
hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in 
execution, an admirable figure; and though one 
rather expects him any day to give his whole 
fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one 
will not, for that, find him any less likable. 
Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque 
hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And 
then, perhaps, he will get back his charm. 

Some one is probably bursting to observe 
that we have a school of realists at hand; and 
that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. 
[no] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



Bennett of sentimentality — also that we have 
Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. 
Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. 
I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about 
Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells Is not 
sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. 
Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, 
Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, 
and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If 
he is sentimental at all, It is rather over ideas 
than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to 
think, is simply catering to the special audience 
that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left 
gaping and empty.) Let us look into the mat- 
ter a little. ^'Sentimental" is one of the most 
difiicult catchwords in the world to define; and 
you can get a roomful of intelligent people 
quarrelling over It any time. Perhaps, for our 
purposes, it will serve merely to say that the 
sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, 
disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give 
a straight account, because his own sense of 
things is more valuable to him than the truth. 
He has come in on the top of the pragmatic 
wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are 
strewn thick with him. He serves, in KlplIng^s 
phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to 
Be (according to his private feeling). His own 
perversion may be aesthetic, or intellectual, or 
moral, or sociological, but he is always recog- 
nizable by his tampering with truth. 

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. 

[Ill] 



MODES AND MORALS 



He did It, for example, in the case of Ann 
Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a 
nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, 
even more, to be unduly awakened to certain 
physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality 
that made him draw her as he did : determina- 
tion to prove that the girl who loved as he 
wanted her to love was just as conventional as 
any one else. You cannot have your cake and 
eat It too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses 
to accept that. Accordingly, we get the uncon- 
vincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to 
believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not 
seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. 
Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells Is not so 
sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has 
not, like the author of The Man of Prop- 
erty, and Fraternity, and Justice, one — just 
one — fixed Idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals 
with a man who is In love with some other 
man's wife; and his world is thereby nar- 
rowed. Mr. Wells is Interested in a good many 
things, and his politics are not purely phil- 
anthropic as most of our novelists' politics 
are. But Mr. Wells's heroes, even when they 
are fairly fortunate, are pre-occupied with their 
own notions of sociological duty, even more 
than they are pre-occupied with passion, though 
their passion is "special" enough when It 
comes. Would any one except a Wells hero 
take a trip to India and come away having 

[112] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? 
Always the author's sympathy is with the 
under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly 
living out his long foredoomed existence, or 
George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with 
diabolic keenness and aching contempt. "Fm a 
spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable 
goddesses," says Ponderevo in a burst of 
frankness. There you have the Wells hero to 
the life. And Mr. Bennett's people are only 
spiritual guttersnipes who are not In love with 
unimaginable goddesses. 

The point is that the guttersnipe is having 
his turn in fiction : if our American heroes are 
not guttersnipes themselves, it Is their sign of 
grace to be supremely interested in gutter- 
snipes. In one way or the other, the gutter- 
snipe must have his proper prominence. Of 
course, there are differences and degrees: a 
few heroes get no nearer the lower classes 
than a passionate desire for reform tickets and 
municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must 
go through Ernest Pontlfex's state of believing 
that poor people are not only more important, 
but In every way way nicer than rich people; 
and few of them go back utterly on that 
belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than 
anything else, marks the change of fashion In 
men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, 
benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved 
the paradox that the object of benevolence is 

["3 1 



MODES AND MORALS 



ex officio more interesting than the bestower. 

I said earlier that in life, as well as in 
literature, men had changed. One's instances, 
obviously, must be from books, and not from 
one's acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philan- 
thropy is the latest social ladder, but it would 
not be so if the people on the top rung were 
not interested in philanthropy. There has been, 
for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of 
interest in sociological questions. Our hard- 
headed young men, of high ideals, find them- 
selves fighting, of necessity, on a different 
battlefield from any that strategists would have 
chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philan- 
thropy being woman's way into politics, women 
have been giving their calm, or hysterical, 
attention to problems which, thirty years since, 
did not, as problems, exist for them. I said 
that the change of taste in women would prob- 
ably account for much of the change of fashion 
in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me 
some years since of her engagement, said (in 
nearly these words), "He is tremendously in- 
terested in city missionary work; it wouldn't 
have been quite perfect if we hadn't had that 
in common." Both were spoiled darlings of 
fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. 
Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have 
been "quite perfect" in the eyes of either. 

The mere conversation of the marriageable 
young has changed past belief. "Social service" 

[114] 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



has usurped so many subjects! Have many- 
people stopped to realize, I wonder, how com- 
pletely the psychological novel and the "prob- 
lem" play (in the old sense) have gone out of 
date? The psychology of hero and heroine, 
their emotional attitudes to each other, are 
largely worked out now in terms of their atti- 
tudes to impersonal questions, their religious 
or their sociological "principles." The indi- 
vidual personal reaction counts less and less. 
If they agree on the same panacea for the 
social evils, the author can usually patch up a 
passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, 
for the most part, are the pages of intimate 
analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any 
longer. As for the "problem play," we have 
It still with us, but in another form. The Doll's 
House and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray are 
both antiquated : we do not call a drama a prob- 
lem play now unless it preaches a new kind of 
legislation. And as for sex — in its finer aspects 
it no longer interests us. 

There was a great deal more sex, in its 
subtler manifestations. In the old novels and 
plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, 
a novel was a love-story; and it was of su- 
preme importance to a hero whether or not he 
could make the heroine care for him. It was 
also of supreme importance to the heroine. 
The romance was all founded on sex; and yet 
sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and 

I "5 1 



MODES AND MORALS 



heroines still marry; but when they consider 
sex at all, they are apt to consider It biologic- 
ally, not romantically. We, as a public, are 
more frankly Interested in sex than ever; but 
we think of It objectively, and a little brutally, 
in terms of demand and supply. And so we get 
often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and 
heroine having no time to make love to each 
other in the good old-fashioned way, because 
they are so busy suppressing the red-light dis- 
trict and compiling statistics of disease. Much 
of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; 
but, beyond a doubt, it has cheapened passion. 
For passion among civilized people is a subtle 
thing; it is wrapped about with dreams and 
imaginings, and can bring human beings to 
salvation as well as to perdition. But when it 
is shown to us as the mere province of cour- 
tesans, small wonder that we turn from it to 
the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or 
Inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at 
the same time, that even the courtesan plies 
her trade only from direst necessity. 

After all, the only safe person to fall in love 
with nowadays is a reformer: socially, finan- 
cially, and sentimentally. And most women, at 
least, could (if they would) say with the Prln- 
cesse Mathilde, *'Je n'alme que les romans 
dont je voudrais etre I'heroine.'' Certainly, 
unless for some special reason, no novel of 
which one would not like to be the heroine — in 
[116I 



FASHIONS IN MEN 



love with the hero — will reach the hundred 
thousand mark. If there are any of us left who 
regret the gentlemen of old — who still prefer 
our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser — 
we must write our own novels, and divine our 
own heroes under the protective coloring of 
their conventional breeding. For they are not 
being "featured," at present, either in life or 
in literature. 



[1171 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 

IT was the late George Meredith, if I mis- 
take not, who was credited with bringing 
women into their joint inheritance of wit 
and passion. He himself supposed himself to 
discard, first of the novelists, the "veiled vir- 
ginal doll." The jeune file had, in the course 
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries, become somewhat dehumanized. She 
was far, indeed, from the frank heroines of 
Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap 
year. The heroine of the old-fashioned senti- 
mental novel forsook her blushing, fainting, 
tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to 
become, on her wedding day, the British ma- 
tron. There seems to have been no transition. 
Meredith apparently felt that the feminine 
share in romance was deplorably and inaccu- 
rately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. 
Scott gave us a few fine examples of the beau- 
tiful girl without frill or flutter, who was 
aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a 
thing or two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in 
her day, was notoriously explicit. 

Not long since, indeed, having brought my- 
self quite up to date with the fiction of the 
contemporary English school — even to the 

[118] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



last instalments of its serial novels — I sought 
out the most demode of the English novelists. 
"Let me see/' I murmured to myself, "just 
what It Is that we have thought it worth while, 
at this expense, to escape." Accordingly, I pro- 
cured all the volumes of Sir Charles Grandi- 
son. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than 
to go to Richardson; and, in all the work of 
Richardson, fairest, surely, to go to Sir Charles. 

I have never known any one who was 
ashamed to confess that Sir Charles Grandi- 
son bored him. It is the last work which any 
defender of the old school of fiction would 
think of using as a basis for argument. And 
yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural 
note is not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron 
loved Sir Charles while he was still bound to 
the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with 
dignity when her friends cautioned her against 
her own feeling. "If this should end at last In 
love" (she writes), "and I should be entangled 
in a hopeless passion, the object of It would be 
Sir Charles Grandison: he could not insult me; 
and mean as the word pity In some cases 
sounds, I had rather have his pity than the 
love of any other man." Such a cry, even 
Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, 
could give us. 

Yet we must give Meredith his due; and 
Meredith, on the whole, honestly surpasses 
these others In the shining list of his adoring 

[1191 



MODES AND MORALS 



heroines — adoring with such dominance in 
meekness, such gayety In surrender. Rose Joce- 
lyn, Henrietta Fakenham, Aminta Farrell, 
Clare Doria Forey (let us write it In full, for 
so she liked it best), Cecilia Halkett, Janet 
Ilchester — it would be hard to match, within 
the century, that group of girls. 

All these names have been recalled simply 
as witnesses to the fact that there Is — In spite 
of the contentions of the contemporary novel- 
ists — a perfectly consistent tradition. In Eng- 
lish novels, of the frank young woman. It is of 
the first importance to establish this, for these 
contemporary authors are talking as If their 
Anns and Isabels and Hildas were the only 
jeunes piles who had ever dared, In literature, 
to love as spirited girls In life really do. Just 
here one quarrels with their pretensions. The 
Victorian convention may have given us Ame- 
lia Sedley, and Lucy Desborough, and Lily 
Dale; but the Victorian era gave us also 
Catherine Earnshaw, and Jane Eyre, and 
Eustacia Vye. Our contemporaries are doing 
nothing new when they show us the jeune fille 
falling in love before she Is proposed to; they 
are doing nothing new when they show us the 
jeune fille wishing, quite specifically, to be a 
wife; they are not even doing anything new — 
rather, something quite dix-huitieme and ro- 
coco — when they show us the jeune fille con- 
sidering whether she will put up with being a 
[ 120] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



mistress. The jeune fille glorying In her choice 
of the Illicit relation Is something, let us grant 
them, more nearly new. Yet how they gabble, 
upon their peak In Darlen! 

No; these authors have not broken with the 
Victorian convention — that simple acrobatic 
feat demanded of all beginners. But they have 
broken with the laboratory method. If they 
think that in Ann Veronica, in Hilda Lessways, 
in Isabel Rivers, they have been more accurate 
than their great predecessors, they are quite 
simply mistaken. I am not proposing to myself, 
or to any one else, to be shocked by these 
young women. Being shocked leaves one, in 
the world of criticism, with no retort. Whether 
or not one is shocked by them is quite another 
question, and one that does not come Into this 
discussion. My own objection to the school of 
Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, Is 
that their heroines are not convincing. 

There is a great deal said and written, now- 
adays, about women as they are and as they 
ought to be ; and very little of it is in the tone 
of Sesame and Lilies, We are told very con- 
tradictory things about our sex; and we are 
exhorted with unvarying earnestness to believe 
each contradiction. We are jeered at for being 
NIetzschean Anns, embodying the ruthless life- 
force, pursuing the man that we may have 
children by him. We are also preached at for 
causing race-suicide. We must want children 

[121] 



MODES AND MORALS 



more than anything else in the world; and we 
must want the state to take care of them for 
us after they are born. We must return to the 
Stone Age; and we must, at the same time, 
join the Fabian Society. We must submit to 
the intense conservatism of eugenics; but we 
must, on the other hand, insult Mrs. Grundy, 
whenever we find it convenient, by taking 
lovers instead of husbands. We ought not to 
marry without assurance that our children will 
be physically perfect; but we may not expose 
them on a mountain top if by any chance they 
are not. 

Only the pragmatist (be it said in passing), 
with his avowed power of sucking the truth 
simultaneously from two mutually exclusive 
hypotheses, could do all the things that, with 
authority, we are told to do. "Modern, indeed! 
She" (Ann Veronica) "was going to be as 
primordial as chipped flint." Yet, if we accept 
the chronologies of history (which seems sane 
enough) nothing could be more "modern" than 
Ann Veronica*s way of being pre-historic. Per- 
haps the solution is for all women to become 
pragmatists? Some of us are bewildered by all 
this; and we wonder a little if the heart-break- 
ing medley of preachments is not the fruit of 
that antique and unpardonable sin — meler les 
genres. In all this chaos, one thing seems to be 
generally agreed on: women are, contrary to 
fusty tradition, very like men — whether like 
[ 122] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



them according to UAge Dangereux, or like 
them according to the latest suffrage pamphlet. 
That is the only thing that we shall unfailingly 
be told. 

There is something in it. We are more like 
men than Mrs. Radcliffe would have believed. 
But the method chosen by these modern hero- 
ines of being like men is chiefly, it would 
appear, to be more so. They will not go half- 
way, but three quarters. The old-fashioned 
man sometimes relented. The new-fashioned 
woman makes quick work of her lover^s virtue. 
There is hardly a villain in an old play but 
would have let the lady off, if she had pleaded 
with him as Capes pleads with Ann Veronica. 
The qualms, the scruples, the regrets, are all 
the man's : the girl refuses utterly to indulge in 
anything so weak. Capes is unfortunate enough 
to say something to Ann Veronica about honor. 
"Only your queer code of honor — Honor I 
Once you begin with love you have to see it 
through." Away with inhibitions! 

"But," some one will object, "all this has 
been said before. And literature is full of 
women who prey passionately on the men they 
say they love. They are a recognized type." 
Granted; but until now, the passionate preying 
and the unsought soliciting have not been done 
by the young unmarried girl of respectable 
traditions. The type is represented, from Poti- 
phar's wife down, by the woman who is no 
[ 123 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



longer jeune fille. One has not traversed either 
literature or life without hearing of exceptions. 
But they are exceptions. The point is, not that 
young women have hitherto been restrained by 
religion and convention, and that when they 
become free-thinkers and despise the existing 
order, they express themselves as they really 
are. The point is that they really are not, for 
the most part, like Ann Veronica and Hilda 
Lessways. 

I and my friends do not object to Ann and 
Hilda because we are afraid that, if we do 
not, people will think that we are like that. 
We object to them because we are told that 
they are normal, healthy-minded young women 
who have led perfectly respectable lives on 
the borders, at least, of gentility; and because 
we know that normal, healthy-minded young 
women who have lived such lives do not ap- 
proach their first love affairs in the temper of 
these heroines. If you wish to say that the 
authors are merely discussing pathological 
cases, you will to some extent be letting them 
out, but they will not thank you for it. What 
is perfectly clear is that they believe girls of 
eighteen or twenty are like that. The last thing 
that they think, evidently, is that these young 
ladies need any attention from physicians or 
alienists. They think — God save the mark! — 
that they have described, in each case, a really 
[124] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



nice girl. Up to a certain point, Ann Veronica 
is nice. When she falls in love, her author goes 
back on her disgracefully. He does not go back 
on her by making her horrid: he goes back on 
her by destroying her actuality. 

One is ready to grant, I say, that women are 
more like men than some — not all — of the 
old-fashioned novelists would have had us 
believe. Let us rail, by all means, at the "veiled 
virginal doll." Let us disagree with Tolstoi 
(it is always good to disagree with Tolstoi!) 
when he says, in the Sonate de Kreutzer, 
"une jeune fille pure ne veut pas un amant; 
elle veut des enfants." Let us admit that the 
modern girl really is frank with herself about 
her desire to marry the man she has chosen. 
Indeed, I cannot think who will deny it. But 
there our respect for realism bids us stop. It 
IS a complex and misty matter, this probing of 
the young girl's secret attitude to life and her 
lover. 

Perhaps the greatest blunder of the new 
realists is that they do not see how complex 
and misty it is. The whole question is almost 
impossible of discussion, it is so difficult and 
delicate. Record the images in the girl's mind, 
if you must — that is the exhaustive, exhausting 
rule of realism. But for God's sake, record 
them as vague, since vague they are! These 
authors fail, precisely because they must, at 

[125] 



MODES AND MORALS 



each instant, Ife vivid. One is tempted to 
recall to them Mr. Chesterton's difficulty with 
Browning's biography: "One can make a map 
of a labyrinth, but who can make a map of a 
mist?" Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett are, appar- 
ently, the successful cabmen who can. They 
offer to take you anywhere you like in this 
London fog of the girl's mind. Under their 
fitful guidance, you will get somewhere; but it 
may not be the address you gave them. 

It is time to come to instances. Luckily for 
one's contention, the frank young feminine 
thing is, in spite of a few sentimental aberra- 
tions of a century ago, in the great English 
literary tradition. (What the new novelists 
have given us, one might remark, is more like 
the frank young thing crossed with the high- 
wayman.) No one need be more explicit than 
Juliet in desiring possession of the man she 
loves, but even Juliet does not find her passion 
for Romeo summing itself up in Ann Veron- 
ica's desire to kiss her idol's feet because she 
is sure that they must have the firm texture of 
his hands; nor is she overpowered at every 
turn, like Hilda, by his "faint, exciting, mascu- 
line odor." And, surely, if any one were to 
bring up an explicit heroine, it would be the 
Nurse! Romantic lovers have always prayed 
for union. Long since, Sir Thomas Browne said, 
"(United souls are not satisfied with embraces, 
but desire to be truly each other; which, being 

[126] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



impossible, their desires are inftnite, and must 
proceed without a possibility of satisfaction." 
What lover has not known that hurt? What 
lover, man or woman, has not welcomed mar- 
riage, and, at the same time, thought it a pis- 
alter? The notion is not a new one. It has 
never been in the greatest tradition of poetry 
or of life for the woman who loves to hold 
back. 

That is not our quarrel with these misrepre- 
sented heroines. Our quarrel with them is that, 
being misrepresented themselves, they misrep- 
resent their prototypes. It is a matter chiefly, 
perhaps, of the actual content of their minds. 
The visions of experience are not the visions 
of inexperience; moreover, there is not one 
frank young thing in ten thousand who does 
not wrap her ardor in a blessed cloak of 
vagueness. She may laugh at her faint ata- 
vistic shiver; but she feels it. She may im- 
mensely like the feeling of her lover's arms 
about her; but she does not Instinctively set 
herself to imagining details that only the slow 
processes of intimacy will normally familiarize 
her with. She may glory in his total effect of 
physical perfection; but she does not go over 
his "points," as if she were buying a horse, or 
drawing an athlete in a life-class. Imagine 
Chaucer's feelings, if any one had tried to 
confound Emilye with the Wife of Bath! Yet 
it is something very like that which Mr. Ben- 
[127] 



MODES AND MORALS 



net has done in his analysis of Hilda's psychol- 
ogy during the momentous half-hour before 
she becomes engaged to Cannon. 

"But at the same time she was in the small 
hot room, and both George Cannon's hands 
were on her unresisting shoulders; and then 
they were round her, and she felt his physical 
nearness, the texture of his coat and of his 
skin; she could see in a mist the separate hairs 
of his tremendous moustache and the colors 
swimming in his eyes; her nostrils expanded in 
alarm to a faint exciting masculine odor. She 
was disconcerted, if not panicstruck, by the vio- 
lence of his first kiss; but her consternation 
was delectable to her." 

Every woman and most men know, I fancy, 
that If Hilda's first proximity to the man who 
dominated her Imagination was of precisely that 
nature, her reaction was probably not precisely 
of that sort. Even the Impersonal machinery of 
the psychological laboratory would have regis- 
tered In her a distinct recoil. The microscope 
is not, and never has been, the lover's favorite 
instrument. It Is doubtful if even the man him- 
self would have been allured by the accurate 
and intimate perception of the coarseness of 
his beloved's skin. One thinks a little, In spite 
of one's self, of Gulliver and Glumdalclitch. 
Certain It Is — and rather amusing, all things 
considered — that none of the men In these nov- 
els indulges in the sensations that crowd the 
[128] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



heroines' hours; though it is written of nearly 
all the heroes that they had experienced matri- 
mony, at the least May it not be that the 
authors know their own sex better than ours? 
Granted that women are very like men: can 
one justly, on that hypothesis, show them as 
more scornful of conventions, of codes of 
honor, of every reticence, moral, intellectual, 
and physical, than these men whom they con- 
sider their masters? It is in each case the man 
who has the bad quarters of an hour over their 
common breaches, real or fancied, of loyalty 
and decency and public opinion; the man who 
has, for his own peace, to find a philosophy 
that justifies them both. 

These authors are not alone among con- 
temporaries in recording such heightened mo- 
ments of a girl's life. One calls to mind, for 
the sheer similarity of the mental plight, Eliza- 
beth, in The Iron Woman. Thus Elizabeth 
writes to David: 

" *Dear' (she stopped to kiss the paper), 
*dear, I hope you won't burn it up because I 
am tired of waiting, and I hope you are too'; — 
when she wrote those last words, she was sud- 
denly shy; *Uncle is to give me the money on 
my birthday — let us be married that day. I 
want to be married. I am all yours, David, all 
my soul, and all my mind, and all my body. I 
have nothing that is not yours to take; so the 
money is yours. No, I will not even give it to 
[129] 



MODES AND MORALS 



you ! it belongs to you already — as I do. Dear, 
come and take it — and me. I love you — love 
you — love you. / want you to take me. I want 
to be your wife. Do you understand .? I want 
to belong to you. I am yours.' 

"So she tried, this untutored creature, to 
put her soul and body into words, to write the 
thing that cannot even be spoken, whose utter- 
ance is silence." 

There is no need to follow further Mrs. 
Deland's analysis of the situation: the proud 
and practical reply from David, which the girl 
considers a rebuff; her sudden marrying of the 
man she does not love — as sheer expression of 
outraged modesty, and recoil from the man 
who had not known how to treat her confession. 
There would be no wisdom in comparing The 
Iron Woman, from any other point of view, 
with the novels we have been mentioning. This 
one episode is interesting simply as a different 
and more convincing record of the frank young 
thing's relation to her own frankness, and of 
the fiery limits of that frankness; pages of 
racking accuracy, in which the girl nearly dies 
of the memory of her own expHcitness. One 
has not even power to protest against Eliza- 
beth's tragic and fooHsh act in marrying Blair; 
it follows upon that mood with the raw inev- 
itability of life. 

Some adherents of the new school may 
think it indelicate to base a general accusation 

[130] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



on the single point of the heroine's psychology. 
In the first place, the accusation is not so gen- 
eral as to preclude very definite admiration of 
other aspects of the school's achievement. 
There is much in Mr. Wells's New Machiavelli 
besides the hero's affair with Isabel Rivers; 
much that goes to the mind and heart of 
all of us. As for effectiveness of method and 
brilliancy of style — one simply does not see the 
need of adding one piping voice to the har- 
monious and already deafening chorus. Were 
there the need, one would do it. 

But the contemporary school has set out to 
"do" a new type of woman: a type which it 
considers important, if not dominant. It has 
even the air of saying: "This is the kind of girl 
with whom intelligent men in the immediate 
future will have overwhelmingly (and to 
their salvation !) to deal. Behold the Newest 
Woman." 

The crux m each book, for the average 
reader, is the maturing of the relation between 
the man and the girl. The girl exists only, in 
spite of her intellectual qualities, for the sake 
of that relation. In each case, she is the ideal 
mate, the high exponent of her sex. She de- 
serves, and must bear, serious consideration 
from every point of view. One has chosen the 
realistic point of view because realism is the 
method these authors abide by. They aim at 
telling the truth as it is; therefore, they stand 

[131] 



MODES AND MORALS 



or fall by the accuracy of their vivid and multi- 
tudinous detail. We are not in the pulpit, but 
in the laboratory. One's honest impression is 
that the scientific observers have mixed their 
slides. 

It is one thing to make your heroine believe 
in free love — doubtless many women do. It is 
pardonable to science to exhibit exceptions to 
the feminine rule, in the person of the girl 
initially over-sexed or neurotic: such cases are 
known to other scientists than these. But it is 
quite another thing to insist on the niceness, 
the normality, the uninterruptedly respectable 
and uneventful breeding of a girl — to exhibit 
her as the type, in other words — and then 
credit her with reactions that do not belong to 
the type. 

There is no point in preaching against a 
modern spirit that is going to develop Anns 
and Hildas and Isabels ad libitum. The con- 
ception of them as heroines may be a sign of 
the times; but they themselves are not yet 
numerous enough to be a sign of the times. It 
is even doubtful if novelists can do in a decade 
what Nature has never shown any sign of 
doing in all her lazy evolutionary progress: 
completely alter natural feminine instincts. 
"But the worst of Ann Veronica is that she's 
there!'' a friend complained to me, not long 
since. Everything has always been there, one 
fancies. All one insists on is that neither Ann 



I 132] 



THE NEWEST WOMAN 



Veronica nor Hilda Lessways is the normal 
representative of the sex. About the morahty 
of Mr. Wells's and Mr. Bennett's books, there 
are probably a hundred opinions. One's own 
present quarrel with them is not that they are 
bad morals, but that they are bad biology. 



[ 133 ] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

WHEN, I wonder, did the word "tem- 
perament" come into fashion with us ? 
We can hardly have got it from the 
French, for the French mean by it something 
very different from what we do; though it is 
just possible that we did get it from them, and 
have merely Bowdlerized the term. At all 
events, whatever it stands for, it long since 
became a great social asset for women, and a 
great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in 
when we discovered that artists were human 
beings. At least, for many years, we never 
praised an artist without using the word. It 
does not necessarily imply "charm," for people 
have charm irrespective of temperament, and 
temperament irrespective of charm. It is some- 
thing that the Philistine never has: that we 
know. But what, by all the gods of clarity, does 
it mean ? 

It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, 
the personal revolt against convention. The 
individual who was "different," who did not 
let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, 
who was not afraid to express himself, who 
hated cliches of every kind — how well we know 
that figure in motley, who turned every occa- 

[134] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

sion into a fancy-dress ball ! All the inconve- 
nient things he did were forgiven him, for the 
sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we 
hardly stopped to realize that his fascination 
was largely a matter of vocabulary. Now it is 
one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and 
quite another to live by your own kaleidoscopic 
paradoxes. The people who frowned on the 
manifestations of "temperament" were merely 
those logical creatures who believed that if you 
expressed your opinions regardless of other 
people's feelings, you probably meant what you 
said. They did not know the pathology of epi- 
gram, the basic truth of which is that word- 
intoxicated people express an opinion long be- 
fore they dream of holding it. They say what 
they think, whether they think it or not. Only, 
if you talk with incessant variety about what 
ought to be done, and then never do any of the 
wild things you recommend, you become in the 
end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention. 
This tactical fact the unconventional folk 
have at last become aware of; and, accord- 
ingly, hostility to convention is ceasing some- 
what to take itself out in phrases. Conventions, 
at the present moment, are really menaced. 
The most striking sign of this is that people 
are now making unconventionality a social vir- 
tue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches 
have been opened, and the laden trains must 
take their chance of a destination. 

[I3S] 



MODES AND MORALS 



The praise of temperament, I verily believe, 
was the entering wedge. But whatever the first 
cause, "conventional" is certainly in bad odor 
as an epithet. And this is really an interesting 
phenomenon, worth investigating. What is it 
that makes it a term of reproach ? Why must 
you never say it about your dearest friend ? 
Why must you contradict, in a shocked tone, if 
your dearest friend is said to be conventional .? 
Most of my best friends are conventional, I 
am glad to say; but even I should never think 
of describing them to others thus. 

Conventional people are supposed to lack 
intelligence — the power to think for them- 
selves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for 
granted that you cannot think for j^ourself, and 
decide to think what the majority of your kind 
thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must 
be because you have no mental processes.) 
They are felt to lack charm: to have nothing 
unexpected and delightful to give you. And, 
nowadays, they are (paradoxes are popular) 
supposed to be perilous to society, because they 
are immovable, because they do not march with 
the times, because they cling to conservative 
conceptions while the parties of progress are 
re-making the world. All these reproaches are, 
at present, conveyed in the one word. 

Now it is a great mistake to confound 
conventionality with simplicity — with that sim- 
plicity which indicates a brain inadequate to 

[136] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

dealing with subtleties; or to confound "tem- 
perament" and unconventionality with a highly 
organized nature. The anthropologists have 
exploded all that. I have looked warily at 
anthropologists ever since the day when I went 
to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the 
Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about 
bull-roarers and leopard-societies. I doubt if 
the anthropologists have any more perspective 
than other scientists. I am as near being an old 
Augustan as any twentieth-century observer 
can be: "nihil humani," etc. But, for God's 
sake, let it be human ! Palaeontology is a poor 
substitute for history. No: I do not love any 
scientists, even the anthropologists. But I do 
think we ought to be grateful to them for prov- 
ing to us that primitive people are a hundred 
times as conventional as we; and that their 
codes are almost too complicated for European 
minds to master. If any one is still under the 
dominance of Rousseau, Chateaubriand et Cie., 
I wish he would sit down impartially before 
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's exposition of 
group-marriage among the Australian aborig- 
ines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, sup- 
posing he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, 
he could marry without incurring punishment, 
or even the death penalty, he had better take 
his subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite 
wasted on civilization. 

Some one may retort that I am not exactly 

[137] 



MODES AND MORALS 



making out a shining case for tabu, in citing the 
very nasty natives of Australia as notable ex- 
amples of what tabu can do for society. My 
point is only this: that it is folly to chide con- 
ventional people for simplicity, since conven- 
tion is a very complicated thing; or for dulness, 
since it takes a good deal of intelligence and a 
great many inhibitions to follow a social code. 
To be different from everyone else, you have 
only to shut your eyes and stop your ears, and 
act as your nervous system dictates. By that 
uncommonly easy means, you could cause a 
tremendous sensation in any drawing-room, 
while your brain went quite to sleep. The 
natives of Central Australia are not nice; but 
they are certainly nicer than they would be if 
they practised free love all the year round, 
instead of on rigidly specified occasions. Their 
conventions are the only morality they have. 
Some day, perhaps, they will do better. But it 
will not be by forsaking conventions altogether. 
For surely. In order to be attractive, we must 
have some ideals, and above all some restraints. 
Civilization is merely an advance In taste : 
accepting, all the time, nicer things, and reject- 
ing nasty ones. 

When the temperamental and unconven- 
tional people are not mere plagiarists of dead 
eccentrics, they lack. In almost every case, the 
historic sense. I am far from saying that all 
conventional folk have It; but they have at 

[138] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

least the merit of conforming. If they do not 
live by their own Intelligence, it Is because they 
live by something that they modestly value a 
good deal more. It is better that a dull person 
should follow the herd: his Initiatives would 
probably be very painful to himself and every 
one else. No convention gets to be a convention 
at all except by grace of a lot of clever and 
powerful people first Inventing It, and then 
Imposing It on others. You can be pretty sure, 
if you are strictly conventional, that you are 
following genius — a long way off. And unless 
you are a genius yourself, that Is a good thing 
to do. Unless we are geniuses, the lone hunt is 
not worth while: we had better hunt with the 
pack. Unless we are geniuses, there Is much 
more fun in playing the game; there Is much 
more fun In caste and class and clan. Uncon- 
ventional people are apt to be Whistlers who 
cannot paint. Of course there is something 
very dull about the person who cannot give 
his reasons for his social creed. But if it Is all 
a question of Instinct, better a trained Instinct 
than an untrained one. I am inclined to think 
that the mid-Victorian prejudice against — let 
us say — actors and actresses, was well founded. 
Under Victoria (or should one say under mid- 
Victoria?) stock companies were not chaper- 
oned, and ladies and gentlemen went on the 
stage very infrequently. What is the point of 
admitting to your house some one who will be 

[139] 



MODES AND MORALS 



very uncomfortable there himself, and who 
will make every one else even more uncomfort- 
able? It is not that we are afraid he will eat 
with his knife: that is a detail we might put 
up with. But eating or not eating with your 
knife is merely one of the little signs by which 
we infer other things. In this mad world, any 
one may do or be anything; but the man who 
has been brought up to eat with his knife is the 
less likely to have been brought up by people 
who would teach him to respect a woman or 
not to break a confidence. It is a stupid rule of 
thumb; but, after all, until you know a person 
intimately, how are you going to judge except 
by such fallible means? I have nothing in the 
world against Nature^s noblemen; but the bur- 
den of proof is, of practical necessity, on their 
shoulders. Manners are not morals — precisely; 
yet, socially speaking, both have the same 
basis, namely, the Golden Rule. No one must 
be made more uncomfortable or more unhappy 
because he has been with you. Now, in spite of 
Oscar, it is worse to be unhappy than to be 
bored; and I would rather be the heroine of a 
not very clever comedy of manners than of a 
first-class tragedy. Most of us, when we are 
once over twenty, are no more histrionic, 
really, than that. The conventional person may 
bore you (though it is by no means certain that 
he will) but he will never, of his own volition, 
make you unhappy unless by way of justified 

[ 140] 



{ 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

retort. He will never put you, verbally or prac- 
tically, Into a nasty hole. Perhaps he will never* 
give you the positive scarlet joys of shock and 
thrill. But, dear me ! that brings us to another 
point. 

Conventional folk are often accused of be- 
ing dull and valueless because they have no 
original opinions. (How we all love original 
opinions I) Well: very few people have any 
original opinions. Originality usually amounts 
only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar. 
*'The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of 
Khatmandhu"; and dead sages, if there were 
only retroactive copyrights, could sue most of 
our modern wits for their best things. What Is 
even Jean-Jacques but Prometheus-and-water, 
if it comes to that? Very few people since 
Aristotle have said anything new. What passes 
for an original opinion is, generally, merely an 
original phrase. Old lamps for new — yes; but 
it is always the same oil in the lamp. Some 
people — like G. B. S. and Mr. Chesterton — 
seem to think that you can be original by con- 
tradicting other people — as if even the person 
who states a proposition did not know that you 
could make the verb negative if you chose! 
Often, they are so hard up that they have to 
contradict themselves. But they are supposed 
to be violently — subversively — enchantlngly — 
original. Even the militant suffragettes have 
not "gone the whole hog" : they have stopped 

1 141 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



short of Aristophanes. What Is the use of con- 
gratulating ourselves on our unprecedented 
courage in packing the house solemnly for 
Damaged Goods, when we have expurgated 
the Lysistrata — and had the barest succes 
d'estime, at that? No: our vaunted unconven- 
tionality is usually a matter of words. I have 
tracked more than one delightful vocabulary 
through the jungle, only to find that it brought 
up at the literal inspiration of the Old Testa- 
ment; and I have inwardly yawned away an 
afternoon with a person who talked in cliches, 
to discover perhaps, at twilight, that on some 
point or other he was startlingly revolutionary. 
The fact is that we are the soft prey of the 
phrase ; and the rhetoricians, whether we know 
it or not, will always have their way with us. 
Even the demagogue is only the rhetorician of 
the gutter. "Take care of the sounds and the 
sense will take care of itself" — as the Duchess 
in Alice did not say. Dulness is a matter of 
vocabulary; but there are no more dull people 
among the conventional than among the uncon- 
ventional. And if a person is to be unconven- 
tional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable : 
for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees 
you nothing but amusement. He does not guar- 
antee you any of the little amenities by which 
society has assured itself that, if it must go to 
sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable 
chair. 

[ 142] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

I was arguing at luncheon one day, with 
three clever women, the advantages and dis- 
advantages of unconventionality. They were all 
perfectly conventional in a worldy sense, and 
perfectly convinced of the charms of unconven- 
tionality. (That is always the way: we sigh for 
the paradises that are not ours, like good Chris- 
tians spurning the Apocalypse and coveting the 
Mohammedan heaven.) They cited to me a 
very amusing person — a priestess of intellec- 
tual revolt. Yes: she walked thirty blocks to 
lunch in a pouring rain, and when she came in 
she took off her wet hat, put it in her chair, 
and sat on it. The fact that my guest, did she 
choose, could afford to crown herself with 
pearls, would not make up to me for the con- 
sciousness that she was sitting on an oozing 
hat throughout luncheon. In spite of epigrams, 
I should feel, myself, perfectly wet through. 
Surely it is the essence of good manners not to 
make other people uncomfortable. Society, by 
its insisting on conventions, has merely insisted 
on certain convenient signs by which we may 
know that a man is considering, in daily life, 
the comfort of other people. No one except 
a reformer has a right to batten on other 
people's discomfort. And who would ever 
have wanted John Knox to dinner? To, be sure,, 
we are all a little by way of being reformers 
now — too much, I fear, as people went to see 
tlje, same Damaged Goods, under shelter of 

[1431 



MODES AND MORALS 



Its sponsors, who cared for nothing what- 
ever except being able to see a risque play 
without being looked at askance. But we shall 
come to that aspect of It later. 

Now ^'temperament,'' again, has often been 
confused with charm; and conventional folk — 
who are, by definition, dull and unoriginal, all 
baked In the same archaic mould — are sup- 
posed to lack charm. They are at best like 
inferior prints of a Hokusai from worn-out 
blocks. The "justification" is bad. Their origi- 
nal may have been all very well; but they them- 
selves are hopelessly manques, and besides, 
there are too many of them. How can they 
have charm — that virtue of the Individual, 
unmatchable, unpredlcable creature? 

It Is not against the acutest critics, the real 
"collectors" and connoisseurs of human mas- 
terpieces, that I am inveighing. I am objecting 
to the stupid criticisms of the stupid; to the 
presence of "conventional" as a legitimate 
curse on the lips of people who do not know 
what they are talking about. One often hears 
It— "I find him" (or "her") "so difficult to 
talk to: he" (or "she") "Is so conventional." 
Good heavens! As if the conventional person 
were not always at least easy to talk to ! He 
may be dull, but he knows his cues, and will 
play the game as long as manners require. It 
is the wild man on a rock, with a code that you 
cannot be expected to know, because it is his 

[ 144] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

own peerless secret, who is hard to talk to. 
The people who say that conventional folk 
lack charm, often mean by "conventional'^ not 
wearing your heart on your sleeve. Now I posi- 
tively like the sense, when I dine out, and stoop 
to rescue a falling handkerchief, that I am not 
going to rub my shoulder against a heart. 
What are hearts doing on sleeves? Am I a 
daw, that I should enjoy pecking at them? 
And who has any right to assume that, because 
they are not worn there, they are non-existent? 
It is of the essence of human nature to long 
for the unattainable. If you do not believe me, 
look at all the love-poetry in the world. As Mr. 
Chesterton says, "the coldness of Chloe" has 
been responsible for most of it. Certainly, if 
Chloe had worn her heart on her sleeve, the 
anthologies would have suffered. And with 
woman the case is the same. Let not the mod- 
ern hero flatter himself that he will ever arouse 
the same kind of ardor in the female heart 
that the heroes of old did: those seared and 
saddened and magnificent creatures who bore 
hearts of flame within their granite breasts — 
but whose breasts were granite, all the same. 
No, gentlemen, women may marry you, but it 
is with a diminished thrill. We want — men and 
women both — to be Intrigued; and I venture 
to say that for purposes of life, not of mere 
irresponsible conversation, it is the conven- 
tional person who intrigues us, since it is only 

I 145] 



MODES AND MORALS 



the conventional person who creates the illu- 
sion of inaccessibility. He may be accessible, in 
reality; and the unconventional, temperamen- 
tal person may be an impregnable fortress. 
That is the dizzy chance of life. But since all 
relations must have a beginning, the initial 
impression is the thing that counts. Of course 
one wants to know that the Queen of Spain has 
legs; but then we can be pretty sure that she 
has. We do not need a slit skirt to reassure us. 
One wants to know that there is a human face 
behind the mask; but who shall say that the 
mask does not heighten such beauty as there 
is? The conventional manner is a kind of 
domino : the accepted costume that all civilized 
people adopt for a time before unmasking. I 
do not suggest that we should disguise our- 
selves to the end; but that we should talk a 
little before we do unmask. 

For there must be some ground on which to 
meet the person we do not know; and why may 
not the majority decide what grounds are the 
most convenient for all concerned? There must 
be some simplification of life : we cannot afford 
to have as many social codes as we have 
acquaintances. Imagine knowing five hundred 
people, and having to greet each with a differ- 
ent formula ! Language would not run to it. 
And would it, in any case, constitute charm? 
Charm, as we all know, is a rare and treasur- 
able thing; and no one can say where it will.be, 

[.1461 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

found. But, as far as we can analyze it at all, 
its elements seem very likely to flourish in con- 
ventional air. Of course there may be a fearful 
joy in watching the man of whom you say: 
"One can never tell what he is going to do 
next.'' But you do not want him about, except 
on very special occasions. For the honest truth 
IS that the unconventional person is almost 
never just unconventional enough. He is pretty 
sure to take you by surprise at some moment 
when you do not feel like being taken by sur- 
prise. Then you have to invent the proper way 
to meet the situation, which is a bore. It is not 
strange that some of our revoltes preach trial 
marriage : for the only safe way to marry them 
at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely 
experienced all the human situations with them, 
you would have no means of knowing how, in 
any given situation, they would behave. They 
might conform about evening-dress, and throw 
plates between courses; they might be charm- 
ing to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit 
down and finish dinner with you. Or they might 
in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. 
The point is that you would never know. You 
could never take your ease in your inn, for 
nothing discoverable in earth or heaven would 
determine or indicate their code. Conventional 
manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien 
who comes among us. Not a fundamentally 
safe one? Perhaps not. But some test there 

[147] 



MODES AND MORALS 



must be; and this, on the whole, Is the easiest 
to pass for those whom we are likely to want 
for intimates. That is really the social use of 
conventions. 

And as for charm: your most charming 
people are those who constantly find new and 
unexpected ways of delighting us. Are such 
often to be found among people who are con- 
stantly finding new and unexpected ways of 
shocking us? I wonder. It seems to me doubt- 
ful, at the least. For shock — ^even the super- 
ficial social shock, the sensation that does not 
get far beneath the skin — is not delight. If you 
have ever really been shocked, you know that 
it is a disagreeable business. Of course, if some 
wonderful creature discovers the golden mean, 
the perfect note: to satisfy in all conventional 
ways, and still to be possessed of infinite variety 
in speech and mood — that wonderful creature is 
to be prized above the phoenix. But you cannot 
give rein to your own rich temperament in the 
matter, let us say, of auction bridge. The rules 
you invent as you go alone may be more shat- 
teringly amusing than anything Hoyle ever 
thought of; but you cannot call It auction, and 
you must not expect other people to know how 
to return your leads. And usually it only means 
breaking rules without substituting anything 
better — revoking for a whim. Life Is as co-op- 
erative a business as football ; and we all know 
what becomes of the team of crack players 

[148] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

when it faces a crack team. Only across the 
footlights are we apt to feel the charm of the 
Ibsen heroine; and even then we are apt to 
want supper and some Irrelevant talk before 
we go to a dream-haunted couch. 

Now this matter of charm is not really an 
arguable one; for charm will win where it 
stands, whether it be conventional or unconven- 
tional. Every one knows about the young man 
who falls in love with the chorus-girl because 
she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends 
can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, 
expecting that all her departures from conven- 
tion will be as agile or as delightful to him as 
that, is still the classic example of folly. It is 
not senseless to bring marriage into the ques- 
tion, for when we advisedly call a man or a 
woman charming, we mean that that man or 
that woman would apparently be a good per- 
son with whom to form an intimate and lasting 
relation — not for us, ourselves, perhaps, but 
for some one else of our sort, in whom he or 
she contrives, by the alchemy of passion, to 
inspire the "sacred terror." To amuse for half 
an hour during which you incur no further 
responsibilities, to delight, in a relation which 
has no conceivable future, does not constitute 
charm; for It Is of the essence of charm that it 
pulls the people who feel it — pulls, without 
ceasing. Charm magnetizes at long range. I 
contend only that conventional people are as 

[149] 



MODES AND MORALS 



apt to have it as any one else, for they have the 
requisites, as far as requisites can be named. 
As for the charm actually resident in conven- 
tionality per se: how should any one who does 
not feel it be converted to it by words of mine? 
For it is a beauty of form : not so much of good 
form as opposed to bad form, as of form 
opposed to formlessness. The foe of conven- 
tion enters into the social plan, if at all, as a 
wild, Wagnerian motif. And the truly uncon- 
ventional person has not even a motif; for he 
disdains repetition. He scorns to stand for any- 
thing whatever, and you are insulting his "tem- 
perament" if you suppose that it is capable of 
only one reaction on any given thing. The 
temperamental critic of literature — like Jules 
Lemaitre in his salad days, before the Church 
had reclaimed him — prides himself on never 
thinking the same thing twice about any one 
masterpiece. Your temperamental creature will 
not twice hold the same opinion of any one 
person. If he has ever been notably pleased 
with a fellow-guest at dinner, it is safest never 
to repeat the combination. For the honor of 
his temperament, he must be disgusted the next 
time. It is his great gift not to be predicable, 
from day to day, from hour to hour. But a 
pattern is always predicable; and what you 
learn about a conventional person goes into the 
sum of knowledge : you do not have to unlearn 
it over night. Psychology becomes a lost art, 

[ISO] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

a discredited science, when you deal with the 
temperamental person. You might as well have 
recourse to astrology. His very frankness is 
misleading. He can afford to give himself 
away, because he gives away nothing but the 
momentary mood. Never attempt to hold him 
to anything he has said: for his whole virtu- 
osity consists in never saying the same thing 
twice, and never necessarily meaning it at all. 
He does very well for the Idle hour, the box 
at the play; but for the business of life — oh I 

And to some of us there is charm in the code 
Itself — charm, that is, in any code, so long as 
it has behind it an idea, though an antique one, 
and is adhered to with faith. The right word 
must always seem "inevitable"; and so must, 
after all, the right act. An improvisation may 
be — must be, if it is to succeed — brilliant; but 
acts, like words, are best if they are In the 
grand style. Whether in speech or in manners, 
the grand style is never a mere magnificent 
idiosyncrasy; for the essence of the grand 
style is to carry with It the weight of the world. 

And conventionality is now said to be sub- 
versive of the moral order! At least, most 
avowedly unconventional people are now treat- 
ing themselves as reformers. Conventions did 
not fall, in spite of the neo-pagans; so the neo- 
Puritans must come in to make them totter. 
And with the neo-Purltans, It must be admitted 
(Cromwell did not live in vain) most of the 

[iSi] 



MODES AND MORALS 



charm of unconventlonallty has gone. It has 
become a brutal business. The neo-pagans real- 
ized that, to be endured at all, they must make 
us smile. If they told a risque story, it must be 
a really funny one. At the present moment, we 
may not go in for risque remarks in the inter- 
ests of humor, but we may make them in the 
interests of morality. We may say anything we 
like at a dinner-party, so long as we put no wit 
into saying it. We must not quote eighteenth- 
century mots, but we may discuss prostitution 
with some one we have never seen before. Any- 
thing is forgiven us, so long as we are not 
amusing. If we only draw long faces, we may 
even descend to anecdote. And when people 
are asked to break with conventions in the 
interests of morality, they may feel that they 
have to do it. It has always been permitted to 
make the individual uncomfortable for the 
good of the community. So we cannot snub the 
philanthropists as we would once have snubbed 
the underbred: for thereby we somehow damn 
ourselves. If you refuse to discuss the whitS 
slave traffic, you are gailty of civic indifference; 
and that is the one form of immorality for 
which now there is no sympathy going. 1 may 
have no ideas and no information about the 
white slave traffic, but I ought to be interested 
in it — interested to the point of hearing the 
ideas, and gathering the information, of the 
person whom I have never seen before. It is 
the "Shakespeare and the musical glasses" of 

[152] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

the present day. Vain to take refuge In plays 
or books : for what play or book is well known 
at all unless It deals with the social evil? 

Now it has already been pointed out that 
vice commission reports have done as much 
harm as good. The discussion of them Is not 
limited to the immune, *'hIghbrow" caste. I 
know of one quite unimperilled stenographer 
who was frightened by them into the psycho- 
pathic ward at Bellevue; and we have all read 
Instructive comments in the daily papers which 
reiterate that virtue is ten dollars a week. A 
much lower figure than Becky Sharp's, but the 
principle is the same. Out of her weekly wage, 
we may be sure the shopgirl (It is always the 
shopgirl I) buys the paper — and therewith her 
Indulgence for future faults, much cheaper 
than Tetzel ever sold one. For Purgatory now 
is replaced by Public Opinion. Even my own 
small town is not free from the prophylactic 
*'movie." One small boy nudges another, as 
they pass the placarded entrance, exclaiming 
debonairly, "Oh, this 'ere white slave traffic, 
y'know!" And the child, I have been given to 
understand, is the father of the man. The un- 
conventional reformers quote to themselves, I 
suppose : 

Vice is a monster of such frightful mien, etc. 

It never occurs to them to finish the sentence: 

We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 

[153] 



MODES AND MORALS 



The fact Is that Anglo-Saxon society has got 
beyond the enduring stage, and Is largely occu- 
pied In pitying. There Is a general sense that 
the people at large, in all moral matters, know 
better than the specialists. We will take our 
creed not from the theologians, but from Mr. 
Winston Churchill; and we will take our path- 
ology not from medical treatises, but from 
Brieux. We will discuss the underworld at din- 
ner because, between the fish and the entree, 
the thin lady with the pearls may say something 
valuable about it. If we are made uncomfort- 
able by the discussion, it only shows that we 
are selfish pigs. 

Now I see no reason why decent-minded 
people should not discuss with their intimate 
friends anything they please. If you are really 
Intimate with any one, you are not likely to dis- 
cuss things unless you both please. But I do see, 
still, a beautiful result of the old order that the 
new order does not tend to produce. The con- 
ventional avoidance as a general subject of 
conversation of sex in all Its phases was a safe- 
guard to sensibilities. You cannot, in one sense, 
discuss sex quite impersonally, for every one is 
of one sex or the other. The people who cry 
out against the segregation of the negro in 
government offices have hardly realized that 
non-segregation is objected to, not because of 
Itself, but because of miscegenation. There Is 
a little logic left in the world; and there 

[154] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

are some people who perceive that sequence, 
whether they phrase it or not. Social distinc- 
tions concern themselves ultimately with whom 
you may and whom you may not marry. You 
do not bring people together in society who are 
tahu to each other. Not that you necessarily 
expect, out of a hundred dinner-parties, any 
one marriage to result; but you assume social 
equality in the people seated about your board. 
Is not, in the last analysis, the only sense in 
such a phrase as "social equality,'' the sense of 
marriageability? Even conventions are not so 
superficial as they seem; and they have that 
perfectly good human basis. It is vitally impor- 
tant to the welfare and the continuance of the 
civilized race that sex-sensibilities should be 
preserved. Otherwise you will not get the 
romantic mating; and the unromantic mating, 
once well established in society, will give rise 
to a perfectly transmissible (whether by hered- 
ity or environment, O shade of Mendel!) 
brutality. It is brutalizing to talk promiscu- 
ously of things that are essentially private to 
the individual; just as it is brutalizing (I be- 
lieve no one questions that) for a family and 
eight boarders to sleep in one room — even a 
large room. All violations of essential privacy 
are brutalizing. We do hot take our tooth- 
brushes with us when we go out to dinner, and 
if we did, and did not mind (very soon we 
should not), the practice, I am sure, would 



MODES AND MORALS 



have a brutalizing effect. A certain amount of 
plain speaking is, perhaps, a good thing; but 
there is no doubt that at present we have far 
too much of it to suit most of us, and I cannot 
see why we should be made to endure it just 
because a few people who are by way of calling 
themselves moralists cannot get on with society 
on its own terms. 

It has long been a convention among people 
who are not cynical that bodily matters are not 
spoken of in mixed and unfamiliar gather- 
ings. Of course, our great-grandmothers were 
prudes. The reason why they talked so much 
about their souls, I fancy, is that there was 
hardly a limb or a feature of the human body 
that they thought it proper to mention. They 
were driven back on religion because they held 
that the soul really had nothing to do with the 
body at all. The psychiatrists have done their 
best to take away from us that (on the whole) 
comforting belief. In America, at least, we are 
finding it harder and harder to get out of the 
laboratory. It is the serious and patriotic 
American in The Madras House who asks 
the astonished Huxtable, "But are you the 
mean sensual man?" In The Madras House 
the question is screamingly funny; but I cannot 
imagine any man's liking, in his own house, to 
have the question put to him by a total stranger. 
The fact is that we have dragged our Ibsen and 
our Strindberg and our Sudermann lovingly 

[1561 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

across the footlights, and are hugging them to 
our hearts In the privacy of our boxes. We 
have decided that manners shall consist entirely 
of morals. It is just possible that, In the days 
when morals consisted largely of manners, 
fewer people were contaminated. You cannot 
shock a person practically whom you are totally 
unwilling to shock verbally; and if you are per- 
fectly willing to shock an individual verbally, 
the next thing you will be doing is to shock 
him practically. Above all, when we become 
incapable of the shock verbal, there will be 
nothing left for the unconventional people but 
the shock practical. And that, I imagine, is 
what we are coming to — all in the interests of 
morality, be it understood. At no time in his- 
tory, perhaps, have the people who are not fit 
for society had such a glorious opportunity to 
pretend that society is not fit for them. Knowl- 
edge of the slums is at present a passport to 
society — so much the parlor philanthropists 
have achieved — and all they have to do is to 
prove that they know their subject. It is an odd 
qualification to have pitched on; but gentlemen 
and ladles are always credulous, especially if 
you tell them that they are not doing their duty. 
Moreover, when you make it a moral neces- 
sity for the young to dabble in all the subjects 
that the books on the top shelf are written 
about, you kill two very large birds with one 
stone: you satisfy precocious curiosities, and 

[157] 



MODES AND MORALS 



you make them believe that they know as much 
about life as people who really know some- 
thing. If college boys are solemnly advised to 
listen to lectures on prostitution, they will lis- 
ten; and who is to blame if some time, in a less 
moral moment, they profit by their informa- 
tion? If we discuss the pathology of divorce 
with the first-comer, what is to prevent divorce 
from becoming, In the end, as natural as daily 
bread? And if nothing is to be tahu in talk, 
how many things will remain tahu in practice? 
The human race Is, in the end, as relentlessly 
logical as that. Even the aborigines that we 
have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over 
to the medicine-man, and keep a few delicate 
silences themselves. Perhaps we are "returning 
to Nature," as the Rousseauists wanted us to; 
with characteristic Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, 
going the savages one better. But it is a pity to 
forget how to blush; for though in the ideal 
society a blush would never be forced to a 
cheek, It would not be because nothing was con- 
sidered (as a German might say) blushworthy. 
Each man's private conscience ought to be a 
nice little self-registering thermometer: he 
ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and 
explicitly within himself, and not care what the 
world thinks. The mass of human beings, how- 
ever, are not made that way; and many people 
have been saved from crime or sin by the simple 
dislike of doing things they would not like to 

[IS81 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

confess to people with a code. I do not contend 
that that is a high form of morality; but it has 
certainly saved society a good many practical 
unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting 
the danger of essentially undiscussable actions 
when we admit every action to discussion. 

I saw it seriously contended in some journal 
or other, not long ago, that, whether any other 
women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes 
ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because 
only thus could the social evil be effectively 
dealt with. Incredible enough ; but there it was. 
Not many people, perhaps, would agree with 
that particular reformer; but undoubtedly 
there is a mania at present, in the classes that 
used to be conventional, for getting one's infor- 
mation from the other camp. It is valuable to 
know the prostitute's opinion — facts never 
come amiss ; but why assume that we have only 
to know it to hold it? Is it not conceivable that 
other generations than our own have known 
her opinions, and that lines of demarcation 
have been drawn because a lot of people, as 
intelligent as we, did not agree with her? 
The present tendency, however, is to consider 
every one's opinion important, in social and 
ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. 
My own pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, 
that the philanthropic assault on the conven- 
tional code has come primarily from people 
who were too ignorant, or too lazy, or too 

[159] 



MODES AND MORALS 



undisciplined, to submit to the code; and that 
the success of the assault results from the sheer 
defenceless niceness — the mingled altruism and 
humility — of the people accused of conven- 
tionality. At all events, the fact is that our 
reticences have somehow become cases of cow- 
ardice, and our rejections forms of brutality. 
We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and 
we are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. 
Well: let us buy green spectacles if we must; 
but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look 
through them! 

It may seem a far cry from "temperament" 
to social service. I have known a great many 
people who went In for social service, and I do 
not think it Is. The motives of the hetero- 
geneous foes of convention may lie as far apart 
as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other, 
by the way, as far as we can make out from 
Peary and Amundsen) but the object is the 
same: to destroy the complicated fabric which 
the centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if 
you call it "restoration," It is apt to amount to 
the same thing, as any good architect knows.) 
At the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and 
drunken rioters will probably be differently 
dealt with; but here on earth, both have 
been given to smashing stained-glass windows. 
Many of us do not believe in capital punish- 
ment, because thus society takes from a man 
what society cannot give. The iconoclasts do 

[i6o] 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

the same thing; for civilization, whether it be 
perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions 
are easy to come by, if you are willing to take 
conventions like those of the Central Austra- 
lians. The difference between a perfected and 
a barbaric convention is a difference of refine- 
ment, in the old alchemical sense. A lot of the 
tahu business is too stupid and meaningless for 
words. Civilization has been a weeding-out 
process, controlled and directed by increasing 
knowledge. We have infinitely more conven- 
tions than the aborigines: we simply have not 
such silly ones. The foes of modern convention 
are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or 
more subtle: they are only attacking all con- 
vention blindly, as if the very notion of tahu 
were wrong. The very notion of tahu is one of 
the rightest notions in the world. Better any 
old tahu than none, for a man cannot be said 
to be "on the side of the stars" at all, unless he 
makes refusals. What the foes of convention 
want Is to have all tahu overthrown. It is very 
dull of them, for even if a cataclysm came and 
helped them out — even if we were all turned, 
over night, Into potential fossils for the delight 
of future scientists — the next beginnings of 
society would be founded on tahu. We shudder 
at the Central Australians; we should hate life 
on their terms. But I would rather live among 
the Warramunga than among the twentieth- 
century anarchists, for I cannot conceive a 
[i6i] 



MODES AND MORALS 



more odious society than one where nothing is 
considered indecent or impious. We may think 
that the mental agility of the Warramunga 
could be better applied. Well: in time, it will 
be. But they are lifted above the brute just in 
so far as they develop mental agility in the 
framing of a moral law, however absurd a one. 
I said that their conventions were almost too 
complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is 
because any mind they have, they give to their 
conventions. It is the natural consequence of 
giving your mind to science and history and 
philology and art, that you simplify where you 
can; also, that your conventions become puri- 
fied by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the 
present day do not want us to throw away such 
text-book learning as we have achieved. They 
do ask us, though, to throw away the racial 
inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring. 
Is it possible that they do not realize what a 
slow and difficult business it is to get any par- 
ticular opinion into the instincts of a race? Only 
the "evolution" they are so fond of talking 
about can do that. Perhaps we ought to take 
comfort from the reflection. But it Is easier to 
destroy than to build up; and they are quite 
capable of wasting a few thousand years of 
our time. 

No : the iconoclasts want to bring us, if pos- 
sible, lower than the Warramunga. Some of 
them might be shocked at the allegation, for 

f 162I 



TABU AND TEMPERAMENT 

some of them, no doubt, are idealists — after the 
fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it understood. 
These are merely, one may say respectfully, 
mistaken: for they do not reckon with human 
nature any more than do the socialists. But the 
majority, I incline to believe, are merely the 
natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, 
of wisdom perceived and followed. They object 
to guarded speech and action, because they 
themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, 
often, it is; but if the moral experience of man- 
kind has taught us anything, it has taught us 
that, without self-control, you get no decent 
society at all. When the mistress of Lowood 
School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girls' hair 
curled naturally, he retorted : "Yes, but we are 
not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to 
become children of grace.'* We do not sympa- 
thize with Mr. Brocklehurst's choice of what 
was to be objected to in nature; we do not, in- 
deed, sympathize with him in any way, for he 
was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better 
to be. In the right sense, a child of grace than a 
child of nature. Attila did not think so; and 
Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked — the 
planet is used to these debacles — but let us not, 
either as a matter of mistaken humility or by 
way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns 
were Crusaders! 



[1631 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

IT is pretty much taken for granted by decent 
folk that the truth should be told in all 
circumstances. "It is never permissible to 
lie" has been, ever since the Christian era came 
in, the common opinion, if not the common 
practice. And yet, which one of us has never 
lied, I will not say against his conscience, but 
for the very sake of his conscience? Conven- 
tional religion has been assumed to be our sole 
guide, while our actual conduct is usually based 
on the different, and more explicit, code of 
honor. Honor is not religion, though with real 
religion it has always been at peace; civilized 
manners are not religion, though, again, they 
have always been at peace with it. In the mat- 
ter of lying, both honor and civilized manners 
have a great deal to say; and the fact that we 
realize this subconsciously is responsible for a 
great many minor perplexities. 

Strictly speaking, in Candide's "best of pos- 
sible worlds" lies should not pass human lips. 
There are many people who stick to the literal 
interpretation of the precept: ladies, for ex- 
ample, who retire to the back porch before 
they permit their maids to tell the unwelcome 
caller that they are "out." There, presumably, 

[164] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

they gaze at the blue sky, and congratulate 
themselves on their unimpeachable veracity. 
Yet even scrupulous people allow their servants 
to say they are out when they are in, because 
"out" is conventionally understood to mean 
many things. On the other hand, Mr. Chester- 
ton tells us that, under certain conditions, mere 
silence is the most damnable lie of all. The 
matter is not so simple as it seems: its intrica- 
cies may become a morass for the unwary, and 
an enchanted garden for the casuist. 

Very f^w people, I fancy, would say, after 
deliberation, that no lie was ever justified. To 
be sure, I once heard a serious young man pro- 
test that Shakespeare had damned Desdemona 
by allowing her, at her last gasp, to exculpate 
Othello. I have also known people who ob- 
jected vehemently to the late Mark Twain 
because he said so many things that were not 
so. But there are occasions when lies are taken 
for granted, even by the law. A man on trial 
for his life is supposed to tell the truth, but not 
if it will incriminate him. A wife is not dragged 
to the witness-stand against her will to testify 
against her husband — no one would legiti- 
mately expect anything but perjury from her. 
I do not see much difference between legally 
permitting a man to say "Not guilty" when he 
is guilty, and legally permitting him to lie. Is 
there any solitary maiden lady who would not 
willingly give the midnight marauder to under- 

[ 165 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



stand that her husband was just coming down 
the stairs, armed to the teeth? A man is not 
supposed, except by an extinct type of Puritan, 
to "give away" the lady who has made sacri- 
fices for him; and even the extinct type of 
Puritan would hardly expect you to tell your 
hostess that her dinner-party had been dull. 
From this heterogeneous group of examples, 
one may infer that there are lies and lies; and 
while it is never permissible to lie, it is some- 
times quite unpermissible to do anything else. 
Most lies of the decenter sort are social. 
*'The admixture of a lie doth ever give pleas- 
ure,** said the moralist Bacon. There is cer- 
tainly very little defence for the lie that does 
not give pleasure. It is to save other people's 
feelings, not our own, that we tell lies. Let me 
put a case quite bluntly. How, without lying, is 
a man to thank his small niece properly for the 
necktie which she has selected for his Christ- 
mas present? No one wants merely to be 
thanked for one's trouble; every one wants to 
be told that his taste has been perfect. Now 
that the late Phillips Brooks's handsome eva- 
sion of fact has become historic, who ever 
dares not to praise a baby explicitly? I confess 
that it goes against the grain with me to say 
that I have enjoyed something which I have 
detested; and I have frequently accepted invi- 
tations (especially over the telephone) because 
my tongue would not twist itself round the 
phrase "another engagement" when the other 
[i66] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

engagement was non-existent. But I have never 
had the slightest compunction about saying 
that I was sorry I had another engagement, 
when I did have another engagement and was 
not sorry. 

I know only one person whom I could count 
on not to Indulge herself In these conventional 
falsehoods, and she has never been able, so far 
as I know, to keep a friend. The habit of literal 
truth-telling, frankly, Is self-Indulgence of the 
worst. Nothing could be more delightful, in an 
evil sense, than telling certain people that their 
Christmas presents, their babies, and their hos- 
pitalities are all horrors which defy descrip- 
tion; especially if one could count it a virtue to 
one's self to say those things starkly. But one 
cannot keep that weapon only for one's foes: 
the only excuse for saying Inexcusable things is 
that one always says them. Roughly speaking, 
one's friends are the people of whom one 
thinks, habitually, pleasant things. But even 
friends can be annoying, or unbeautlful, or dull. 
And it is of the essence of those manners which 
are morals not to tell them so if one can help 
it. "Faithful are the wounds of a friend" — 
and must sometimes be dealt. But no stabbing 
over non-essentials ! And above all, no stabbing 
when it is a pleasure to stab. Sometimes these 
truth-tellers congratulate themselves that their 
praise is Immensely enhanced by Its rarity. 
There, I fancy, they are mistaken: for In the 
first place, praise that is too long on the way 

[167] 



MODES AND MORALS 



loses its savor; and in the second, they acquire, 
I have noticed, a censorious habit of mind that 
prevents them from praising at all. 

No: in the course of mere conventional liv- 
ing, a certain amount of lying must be done. 
"How do you do?'* "I am very well, thank 
you." You may have indigestion, and in that 
case you have lied. Yet is it your business to 
make your acquaintance uncomfortable by tell- 
ing him the facts in the case? Certain things 
are true of any man personally which have 
nothing to do with his social existence : person- 
ally, if he has a toothache, he has it; socially, 
he has not a toothache unless he mentions it. 
Then, there are lies which are not verbal at 
all — lies of implication. The early Puritans 
who objected to paint and powder, objected to 
them, I fancy, on perfectly Catholic grounds — 
it was immoral to make yourself attractive, 
and paint and powder were literally meretri- 
cious. On the same principle, to this day, a nun 
cuts off her hair. The modern feeling against 
paint and powder — for it does in some quar- 
ters survive — is rather, I imagine, on the score 
of dishonesty. You are not supposed to disguise 
a beautiful complexion if you really have it. 
But if you have not a good complexion, you are 
deceiving people — you are acting a lie — by 
making yourself look as if you had. The ground 
of the objection has shifted. 

Some author — is it Mr. Kipling? — says of 

[i68] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

one of his heroines that she was as honest as her 
own front teeth. I know a great many people 
who are as honest as their own front teeth are 
false; and certainly no one expects them to go 
about calling attention to the skill of their 
dentist. Perhaps some sophist will say that 
between wearing false hair and declaring one's 
false hair to be one's own, there Is all the differ- 
ence in the world. I protest that It is tacit false- 
hood to wear It at all — unless one does it after 
the fashlonless fashion of an ancient lady I 
knew in my childhood who, quite bald at the 
age of ninety-five, hung two wads of chestnut 
hair across her head, like saddle-bags, on a 
black velvet ribbon. And such tacit falsehoods 
are all In the spirit of the conventional polite- 
ness we use daily. To rouge a pale face may be 
vanity; but to thank a stupid hostess for the 
pleasure she has not given, is loving one's 
neighbor as one's self. I am Inclined to think 
that even rouge Is more often than not altru- 
istic in intention. One does not wish, for the 
sake of society, to be either a fright or a brute. 
Certain things are demanded of every man 
who meets the world on Its own ground. From 
the moment he has "accepted with pleasure," 
he has agreed to play the. game; and It Is as 
unfair of him to give or take the wrong cues 
as it would be for the castle to Insist on making 
the knight's move. No : we need not go out of 
our way to lie; but we must not, even to be 

[169] 



MODES AND MORALS 



clever, tell the truth when an innocent He is 
innocently demanded of us. 

It occurs to me that my examples of conven- 
tional falsehood are largely feminine. So, I 
fancy, they should be. One of the reasons, 
surely, why women have been credited with less 
perfect veracity than men is that the burden of 
conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them. 
A man expects his wife to do this kind of thing 
for him. It is she who accepts or refuses their 
common invitations, directs their joint social 
manoeuvres, encounters the world for them 
both on the purely social side. He is not ex- 
pected to do it any more than he is expected to 
order the dinner. There is more straight-from- 
the-shoulder talk, I imagine, among men by 
themselves than among women by themselves; 
but that is partly because women slip out of the 
social harness less frequently and less easily. 
A man among men is perhaps (I speak under 
correction) more inveterately his personal 
self; a woman among women more inveter- 
ately her social self. It may be that it is easier 
to wear the harness constantly than to gall 
one's shoulders afresh each day with putting it 
on. I am inclined to think that women are as 
honest with their intimate friends as are men; 
rbut — they have had an age-long training in the 
penalties of making one's self unpleasant. So 
many low motives are imputed to women — and 
most of them, at the present day, quite unjustly 

[ 170] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

— that they are driven to the lesser mendacities 
for the sake of getting some justice done them. 
When Mr. A. asks Mrs. B. if she does not 
think Mrs. C. beautiful, she is almost bound to 
say that she does, though she does not. Other- 
wise, she will be taken for a jealous fool. One 
lie is better than two; and it is better to be 
thought a fool when you are not, than jealous 
and a fool when you are neither. 

Comparatively few people, however, will 
cavil at these mendacities, which are indeed 
^eu5^ aypevhri — as mechanical and uncalcu- 
lated as a gentleman's "I beg your pardon'* 
when a lady has insisted on colliding with him 
in the street. Truth is not so difficult to bound 
on that side; for most people recognize the 
social exigency, and if you are praising some 
one's unskilful cook on one day, the chances 
are that she will be congratulating you on your 
amateur gardening the next. We simply have 
to be polite, as our race and clime understand 
politeness; and no one except a naif is really 
going to take this sort of thing seriously. It is 
perhaps regrettable that we do not carry cour- 
tesy even further; for nothing makes people 
so worthy of compliments as occasionally re- 
ceiving them. One is more delightful for being 
told one is delightful-r-just as one is more 
angry for being told one is angry. Let us pass, 
however, to more debatable ground. 

There is an old refrain which runs, "Ask me 

[171] 



MODES AND MORALS 



no questions, FU tell you no lies." I am inclined 
to think that it is full of social philosophy. 
Most of us, probably, have put up our hardest 
fights for veracity on occasions when questions 
have been asked us that never should have 
been asked. "Refuse to answer," says the ghost 
of that extinct Puritan whom we have evoked. 
An absurd counsel: for, as we all know, to 
most of these questions no answer is the most 
explicit answer of all. If the Devil has given 
you wit enough, you may contrive to keep the 
letter of the commandment. But usually that 
does not happen. I dare say many moralists 
will not agree with me ; but I hold that a ques- 
tion put by some one who has no right, 
from any point of view, to the information 
demanded, deserves no truth. If a casual gos- 
sip should ask me whether my unmarried great- 
aunt lived beyond her means, I should feel 
justified in saying that she did not, although it 
might be the private family scandal that she 
did. There are inquiries which are a sort of 
moral burglary. The indiscreet questioner — 
and by indiscreet questions I mean questions 
which it is not conceivably a man's duty either 
to the community or to any individual to answer 
— IS a marauder, and there is every excuse for 
treating him as such. I am sure that every 
reader remembers, in his own experience, such 
questions, and counts among his acquaintance at 
least one such questioner. Let him say whether, 

[172] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

in these conditions, he has felt it his moral duty 
to hand over information, any more than he 
would consider it his moral duty to hand over 
his plate to a thief. I am not speaking of cases 
where the temptation to lie is merely the temp- 
tation to save one's face : it is not permissible to 
lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes 
permissible to lie to save another person's face 
— as it was pardonable, surely, in Desdemona 
to declare that Othello had not murdered her. 
In regard to the lie of exaggeration, a word 
should perhaps parenthetically be said. We all 
know the child who has seen two elephants in 
the garden eating the roses. We also know the 
delightful grown-up who "embroiders" his nar- 
ratives. He will never tell the same adventure 
twice with the same details. The fact remains 
that he may each time leave you with precisely 
the same impression of the adventure in its 
entirety. It is quite possible that you trust him 
exceedingly. Of course it is also possible that 
his hen trovato is never vero. You will have 
to determine after long experience of him 
whether he is fundamentally false, or merely 
has a sense of style. Personally, I know exag- 
gerators of both kinds: people whose lies are 
only picturesque adjectives, and people whose 
picturesque adjectives are only lies. There is 
a subtle distinction between the two. At the 
risk of being at loggerheads with the rhetori- 
cians, one must say that truth goes deeper than 

[173] 



MODES AND MORALS 



words, and that there is not much in a truthful- 
ness which is only phrase-deep. 

The old ladies who are shivering on the back 
porch will disapprove of me for saying these 
things, almost as much as I disapprove of them 
for being on the back porch. To speak frankly, 
I have not found that the people who cling to 
the letter are always the people who cling to 
the spirit of the law. Some of the men and 
women who will not say in so many words the 
thing which is not, will deliberately give a false 
impression. They are not the servants of truth; 
they are the parasites of truth. The ladies I 
have referred to may be technically "out" ; but 
they are really "out" only to the undesired visi- 
tor — exactly as much as if they had stopped in 
their own sitting-rooms. (Remember, please, 
that I am not speaking of the people who re- 
ceive the unwelcome caller rather than permit 
a maid to fib — they are in a very different 
case.) I should not instinctively go to these 
people for an accurate account of a serious sit- 
uation. Any one whose conscience is satisfied 
with that kind of loyalty to fact knows very 
little about the spirit of truth. 

I do not jeer at literal accuracy: I think it 
an excellent safeguard for all of us. The person 
who has never indulged in a literal falsehood 
is the less likely to have indulged in a real 
one. Generally speaking, words follow facts 
with a certain closeness. Not always, however. 

[1741 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

I may truthfully say that my teeth are my own, 
if I have paid for them; but I shall none the 
less give a wrong impression to the engaging 
creature who has asked me if they are false. 
Substitute serious equivalents for that kind of 
veracious reply, and you will see what I mean. 
I am not at all sure that, where there is room 
for doubt, the people I have cited will not 
largely take the benefit of the doubt to them- 
selves. I am not sure, for example, that the 
formula "I will not tell any one" stands to 
them for anything but a fallible human proph- 
ecy — something apt to be set at naught by the 
God who maketh diviners mad. I strongly sus- 
pect that mere loyalty will never make them 
hold their tongues. And I am quite sure that 
they will often be silent when silence is the most 
damnable lie of all. For, in their technical 
sense, silence can never be a lie. 

In this short distance, we have come near to 
the heart of the matter. Remember that the 
only lie forbidden in the Decalogue is false 
witness against one's neighbor. I may feel real 
respect for the lady on the porch — when I 
think that it may be hailing, I feel positive 
awe — ^but I should not like to make her the 
recipient of an intimate confidence. Such a per- 
son is wholly at the mercy of the unscrupulous. 
To be, for one's self, at the mercy of the un- 
scrupulous, suggests, I admit, the saint; to be, 
for one's friends, at the mercy of the unscru- 

[I7S] 



MODES AND MORALS 



pulous, suggests the cad. It is not, for » the 
normal person, a pleasant thing to lie: it is 
much easier to record the truth quite auto- 
matically. There is in each of us who have been 
decently brought up a natural antipathy to say- 
ing "the thing which is not." The basis of truth 
is so much the finest basis on which to meet 
one's fellow-men! I have much sympathy with 
the unpopular people who cannot bring them- 
selves, even in a ball-room, to "play the game." 
Of all ugly things to be, perhaps a liar is the 
ugliest. And yet, and yet — We may not go into 
Victor Hugo's rapture over the nun in Les 
Miserables who gave the mendacious answer 
to Javert; but which of us wishes she had told 
the inspector that Jean Valjean was actually in 
the room? Fortunately, such crucial instances 
are rare ; and usually we can benefit our friends 
most by telling the truth about them — if it 
were not so, they would not be beloved. It is a 
poor cause which has to be lied for regularly. 
But in the rare case like that of Soeur Simplice, 
let us hope that we, too, should lie, and be as 
sure as she of making our peace with Heaven. 
For one's self alone, it is a question whether 
any lie could bring such luxury as that of telling 
the simple truth. To lie to save one's self is the 
mark of the beast; to lie to save another per- 
son may make one distrust the cosmos, but at 
least it is a purer fault. For it seems to be 
agreed on by all codes that the unselfish motive 

[176] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

is a mightily purging element. On the whole, I 
should say that the person who likes to lie 
should never, in any circumstances, be allowed 
to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. 
You will not find them indulging often. 

Perhaps the greatest conflict for Puritan 
youth has always come when it faced for the 
first time the unfamiliar shape of Honor. 
Honor and John Calvin have fought on many 
a strange battlefield for the young soul, and 
the young soul must often have wondered 
which was friend and which was foe. 

Honour and wit, foredamned they sit, 

sings Kipling in an atavistic moment. Which of 
us has not at some time or other shudderingly 
understood him? And yet it is only the for- 
tuitous trappings of Honor which can so dis- 
turb. For the truest thing about Honor is that, 
like Charity, it "seeks not itself"; and Honor 
in the mediaeval sense was the darling child of 
the Church. Honor does not break its word; it 
protects the weak against itself, and against 
others; it keeps its engagements. It is more 
immediately concerned with its duty to human- 
ity than with its duty to God; which is doubt- 
less why the Puritan mystic saw it as a foe. 
The code of honor is the etiquette-book of the 
Christian; and the people who have attacked 
It are the people who have considered that 
Christians needed no etiquette. By our ances- 



MODES AND MORALS 



tors who were bred in the cold and windy times 
of the Reformation it was held to deal chiefly 
with duelling, gaming, and illicit affairs. *'The 
debt of honor," "the affair of honor" — what 
do even these corrupted phrases mean except 
that the gentleman has found more ways to 
bind himself than the laws of the land afford? 
I do not know that Honor ever compelled a 
man to gamble or to provoke a quarrel; but 
if he has gambled or if he has quarrelled — if 
he has undertaken to play the lamentable game 
— he must not skulk behind a policeman, like a 
cry-baby or a sans-culotte, because things have 
not gone his way. If he has broken, he must 
pay. 

Part of the code of honor begins only when 
the Christian precept has been broken. Is it so 
bad a thing, in a fallible world, to be told what 
to do after you have once done something 
wrong? The Catechism, as a practical .guide, 
is wofully incomplete without the code of the 
gentleman as an appendix. If you had sinned, 
the Puritan told you to repent; and he was 
quite right. But there is work left for the sinner 
after the repenting has been done. Both Honor 
and the Catechism will do their best to keep 
you out of a mess. The difference comes 
later: for after you have got into a mess, the 
Catechism leaves you to God, while Honor 
shows you how, if you have done ill to fellow 
beings, to repair that ill and not extend it. 

Honor is a matter of practical politics — 

[178] 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

frightfully unpractical politics, In another sense, 
they often are. A cynical young woman once 
said to me that she found cads more interest- 
ing than gentlemen, because you could always 
tell what a gentleman would do in a given 
situation, whereas you could never tell, In any 
situation, what a cad would do. Cads may or 
may not be the proper sport of cynical young 
women; but to the average busy creature the 
gentleman is wholly delightful in that he is 
wholly predicable. The Christian is not pred- 
icable, for the simple reason that he has been 
given a counsel of perfection. You know that 
any given Christian will, by the day of his 
majority, have done some, at least, of the 
things which the Catechism has expressly 
warned him not to do. "The way that can be 
walked upon is not the perfect way," said Lao- 
tse long ago. The Church does not believe that 
you have always done everything that your 
sponsors in baptism so cheerfully said you 
would do. The confessional is itself the great- 
est confession that the Church has ever made. 
One of the most convenient things about Honor 
is that its explicit code is limited; and you can 
say of some men when they die that they have 
never for a moment ceased to be gentlemen. 
Honor is of the world, worldly — and- some 
people have distorted that magnificent fact into 
an accusation. That is what Mr. Kipling has 
done in "Tomllnson." 

All this about Honor is not so much a digres- 

[ 179] 



MODES AND MORALS 



sion as an approach. For If few people will 
quarrel with the lies of implication and of con- 
vention, and most people pray to be delivered 
from the lie of self-defence, the lie "of obliga- 
tion" cannot be juggled away; and it Is the lie 
of obligation which Honor commands. Honor 
has never permitted, still less commanded, a lie 
for personal gain or satisfaction of any kind; 
but there are cases when the gentleman must 
He If he Is to be a gentleman. The gentleman 
does not betray the friend who has trusted him, 
even though he may bitterly object to having 
that friend's secrets on his hands. From that 
supreme obligation lies sometimes of necessity 
result. I said just now that Honor and John 
Calvin must often have fought for the young 
soul; and it does not take an over-vivid imag- 
ination to conceive cases. Religion (in spite of 
the Decalogue) has tended to lump all lies 
together as the offspring of the Devil, while 
the code of the gentleman has always set aside 
a few lies as consecrated and de rigiieur. But 
the gentleman, I venture to say, has always 
told those lies in the spirit in which a man lays 
down his life for his friend. For no gentleman 
lies, on any occasion, with unmixed pleasure. 
He feels, rather, as if he had put on rags. 

It is easier — as some sociologists do — to 

plot the curves of a desire than to fix the 

boundaries of truth. The domain of truth Is 

not world-wide: that, we know. They must be 

[ 180I 



J 



THE BOUNDARIES OF TRUTH 

home-keepers Indeed — perpetually cradled — ■ 
who need never lie. Literal truth is impris- 
oned in a palace, like the Pope in the Vatican, 
affecting to be the ruler of the world. Even the 
faithful know that the claim is vain. The lies of 
obligation and convention are not, In the deep- 
est sense, unveracious; for they are not pre- 
eminently intended to deceive. We expect them 
of other civilized beings and expect other civi- 
lized beings to expect them of us. Speaking 
such falsehoods, and such falsehoods only, we 
are still on truth's own ground. The lie told for 
the liar's own sake marks the moment when a 
man has passed from beneath her standard, 
across her shadowy sphere of influence, and is 
already hot-foot into the jungle. 



[i8il 



MISS ALCOTT'S NEW ENGLAND 

I REMEMBER being very much impressed 
— and not a little shocked — when a friend 
of mine told me that she had never, in her 
childhood, been able to get any real pleasure 
out of Louisa Alcott's stories. It had never 
occurred to me that being brought up in New 
York instead of in New England, or even 
being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, 
could make all that difference. Miss Alcott 
seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely in- 
evitable delight, of childhood. Little Women 
was as universal as Hamlet, I remembered 
perfectly that French playmates of mine in 
Paris had loved Les Quatre Filles du Doc^ 
teur March (though the French version was 
probably somewhat expurgated). If children 
of a Latin — moreover, of a Royalist and Cath- 
olic — tradition could find no flaw in Miss 
Alcott's presentment of young life, I could not 
see why any free-born American child should 
fail to find it sympathetic. 

I questioned my friend more closely. Her 
answer set me thinking; and it is probably to 
her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss 
Alcott's special quality and special documen- 
tary value. For what my friend said was simply 
[182] 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

that the people in the books were too under- 
bred for her to get any pleasure out of reading 
about them. My friend was not, when I knew 
her, a snob; and I took it that she had made 
the criticism originally at a much earlier age. 
All children are as snobbish as they know how 
to be; and I fancy that the child's perennial 
delight in fairy-tales Is not due solely to the 
epic instinct. One is interested in princes and 
princesses, when one is eight, simply because 
they are princes and princesses. Of royalty, one 
is perfectly sure. I have never known a child 
who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a prin- 
cess in disguise, or who felt any real sympathy 
with the princess who was only a disguised 
goose-girl. You do not have to expound the 
Divine Right to any one under twelve. Peas- 
ants are an acquired taste; and socialism is an 
illusion of age. 

Out of such axioms as these, I made my 
explanation of my friend's heterodoxy. I re- 
membered my own reaction, when very young, 
on a story that centred In a masked ball to 
which all the Inhabitants of the kingdom were 
bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, 
and all the court ladles went as milkmaids — a 
mere rounding out of the. Petit Trianon epi- 
sode. The moral was obvious; and I recall 
being frightfully disturbed by my own absolute 
certainty that. If I had been going to a masked 
ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as 

[183] 



MODES AND MORALS 



grandly as I possibly could. I should never 
have gone as a milkmaid, so long as the cos- 
tumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps 
mean that I was, on the whole, nearer to the 
milkmaid than to the court lady? I did not 
like the story, but I have never, to this day, 
forgotten it. Perhaps my friend had been of 
the same age when she discriminated against 
Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contempo- 
raries had made no such discrimination. As I 
say. It set me to thinking. Since then, I have 
read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many 
times, and I think I understand. 

The astounding result of re-reading Miss 
Alcott at a mature age Is a conviction that she 
probably gives a better Impression of mld- 
jCentury New England than any of the more 
laborious reconstructions, either in fiction or In 
essay. The youth of her characters does not 
hinder her In this; for childhood, supremely, 
takes life ready-made. Mr. Howells's range Is 
wider, and he is at once more serious and more 
detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can 
be compared as little as Madame Bovary 
and the Bihliotheque Rose, Yet, although 
their testimonies often agree, his world does 
not "compose" as hers does. It may be his very 
realism — his wealth of differentiating detail, 
his fidelity to the passing moment — that makes 
his early descriptions of New England so out 
of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott Is con- 

[184] 



MISS ALCOTVS NEW ENGLAND 

tent to be typical. All her people have the same 
background, live In the same atmosphere, pro- 
fess the same ideals. Moreover, they were 
ideals and an atmosphere that imposed them- 
selves widely during their period. Mr. Howells 
gives us modern instances in plenty, but no- 
where does he give us clearly the quintessential 
New England village. It is precisely the famil- 
iar experiences of life in that quintessential 
village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless 
accuracy, without arriere-pensee. And it must 
be remembered that, in spite of Dr. Holmes's 
brave and appropriating definitions of aristoc- 
racy, and the urbanity which the descendants of 
our great New Englanders would fain per- 
suade us their ancestors possessed, our great 
New Englanders were essentially villagers, and 
that the very best thing to be said of them is 
that they wrought out village life to an almost 
Platonic perfection of type. "Town'* will not 
do to express the Boston, the Cambridge, the 
Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: It 
smacks too much of London — and freedom. 
The Puritans founded villages ; and, spiritually 
speaking, the villages that they founded are 
villages still. The village that Miss Alcott knew 
best was Concord; and if, for our present pur- 
pose, we find It convenient to call Concord 
typical of New England, we shall certainly not 
be doing New England any Injustice. 

As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading 

[185] ■ 



MODES AND MORALS 



her, IS the extraordinary success with which 
she has given us our typical New England. 
Some of her books, obviously, are less success- 
ful in this way than others — Under the 
Lilacs, for example, or Jack and Jill, where 
(one cannot but agree with her severer critics) 
there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. 
There Is an equally inexcusable amount of 
love-making. It is Interesting to remember, 
in much of the earlier Howells. But for con- 
temporary record of manners and morals, you 
will go far before you match her masterpiece. 
Little Women. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, 
and Laurie do not teach us about life in New 
England at a certain time, we shall never learn 
from any collected edition of the letters of 
Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne. 

The next — and equally astounding — result 
of re-reading Miss Alcott was, for me, the un- 
expected and not wholly pleasant corrobora- 
tion of what my friend had said about her 
characters. They were, In some ways, under- 
bred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. 
March?) quotes Plato in his family circle; but 
his family uses inveterately bad grammar. 
*'Don't talk about ^labelling' Pa, as If he was a 
pickle-bottle I" — thus Jo chides her little sister 
for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might 
expect from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should 
we expect the exquisite Amy (any little girl 
will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to 
[i86] 



i 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

be) to write to her father from Europe, about 
buying gloves In Paris, *'Don't that sound sort 
of elegant and rich?" 

The bad grammar, in all the books, is con- 
stant. And yet, I know of no other young 
people's stories, anywhere, wherein the back- 
ground is so unbrokenly and sincerely "liter- 
ary." Cheap literature is unsparingly satirized; 
Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as every- 
day matters; and "a metaphysical streak had 
unconsciously got into" Jo's first novel. In 
The Rose in Bloom, Miss Alcott misquotes 
Swinburne, to be sure, but she does it in the 
interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes 
other lines from the same poet correctly. Of 
course, we all remember that Emerson's 
Essays helped on, largely, Mac's wooing — 
if. Indeed, they did not do the whole trick. 
And has there ever been an "abode of learn- 
ing" — to slip, for a moment, into the very 
style of Jo's Boys — like unto Plumfield, 
crowned by "Parnassus"? After all, too, we 
must remember how familiarly even those 
madcaps, Ted and Josle, bandied about the 
names of Greek gods. The boys and girls who 
scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott's 
young heroes and heroines are, alack! not so 
much at home with classical mythology as the 
young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the 
bad grammar is everywhere — even in the 
mouths of the educators. 

[1871 



MODES AND MORALS 



Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter 
of speech; and I fancy that my friend referred 
even more specifically to their manners — their 
morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott's 
people are, as the author herself says of them, 
unworldly. They are even magnificently so; 
and they score the worldly at every turn. You 
remember Mrs. March's strictures on the 
MofFats ? and Polly's justifiable criticisms of 
Fanny Shaw's friends? and Rose's utter lack 
of snobbishness about Phoebe, the little scullery- 
maid, who eventually was brought up with her? 
Of course, Archie's mother objects, at first, to 
his marrying Phoebe, but she is soon recon- 
ciled — and apologetic. 

Granted their unworldllness, their high scale 
of moral values, where, then, is the trace of 
vulgarity that Is needed to make breeding 
bad? They pride themselves on their separa- 
tion from all vulgarity. "My mother is a lady," 
Polly reflects, "even If" — even if she Is not 
rich, like the Shaws. The March girls are 
always consoling themselves for their vicissi- 
tudes by the fact that their parents are gentle- 
folk. Well, they are underbred in precisely the 
way in which, one fancies, the contemporaries 
of Emerson in Concord may well have been 
underbred. It Is the "plain-living" side of the 
"high thinking." They despised externals, and. 
In the end, externals had their revenge. Breed- 
ing, as such, is simply not a product of the 
[i88] 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

independent village. (Some one may mention 
Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford inde* 
pendent, with its slavish adherence to the eti- 
quette of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, its 
constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley 
and the "county families.") The villagers have 
not — and who supposes that Bronson Alcott 
and Thoreau had it? — the gift of civilized 
contacts. A contact, be It remembered, is not 
quite the same thing as a relation. Manners 
are a natural growth of courts. Recall any 
mediaeval dwelling of royalty; then imagine 
life lived in those cramped chambers, in the 
perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors 
alike — and lived informally! 

In Miss Alcott's world, all that is changed. 
According to the older tradition, a totally un- 
chaperoned youth would mean lack of breed- 
ing. Flere, on the contrary, all the heroines are 
unchaperoned, while the match-making mamma 
is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles's 
head for nothing. The reward of the unchap- 
eroned daughter is to make a good match. In 
that rigid school, conventions are judged — and 
nobly enough, Heaven knows ! — from the 
point of view of morals alone (of absolute, 
not of historic or evolutionary morals) and 
many conventions are thereby damned. The 
result is a little like what one has heard of 
contemporary Norway. "Underbred'' is very 
likely too strong a word ; yet one does see how 

[1891 



MODES AND MORALS 



the social state described in Little Women 
might easily shock any one brought up in a less 
provincial tradition. There is too much love- 
making, for example. Though sweethearting 
between five-year-olds is frowned on, sweet- 
hearting between fifteen-year-olds is quite the 
thing. In real life, it would not always be safe 
to marry, very young, your first playmate. Any 
one who has lived in the more modern New 
England village knows perfectly well that 
people still marry, very young, their first play- 
mates, and that disaster often results. Nor can 
Una always depend on the protection of a lion 
that is necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo's 
precocious sense was right, and that it would 
have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; 
which of us believes that, in real life, she would 
not have made the mistake? You cannot de- 
pend on young things in their teens to foresee 
the future of their temperaments accurately. 
One cannot but feel that if Mrs. March really 
saw the complete unfitness of those two for 
each other, it was her duty to put a few con- 
ventional obstacles in their path. 

Perhaps all this was part of what my friend 
meant by lack of breeding in the traditional 
sense: the social laissez-aller m extraordinary 
(and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) 
combination with moral purity. But I suspect 
that she referred, as well, to another aspect 
of Miss Alcott's environment : to the unmistak- 

[190] 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

able lack of the greater and lesser amenities 
of life. The plain living is quite as prominent 
as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the 
March girls' lives is a very commonplace fab- 
ric. You know that their furniture was bad — 
and that they did not know it; that their 
aesthetic sense was untrained and crude — and 
that they did not care; that the simplicity of 
their meals, their household service, their 
dress, their every day manners (in spite of the 
myth about Amy) was simplicity of the com- 
mon, not of the intelligent, kind. You really 
would not want to spend a week in the house 
of any one of them. Nor had their simplicity 
in any wise the quality of austerity. Remember 
the pies that the older March girls carried for 
muffs (the management whereof was one of 
the ever unsolved riddles of my childhood). 

No: in so far as breeding is a matter of 
externals, one must admit that there is some 
sense in calling Miss Alcott's people under- 
bred. Perhaps we do not choose to call breed- 
ing a matter of externals. In that, we should 
perfectly agree with Miss Alcott's people 
themselves; and to that we shall presently 
come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss 
Alcott's work is a genuine document. 

I have spoken of the unimpeachable moral- 
ity of Miss Alcott's world. Charlie lost Rose 
for having drunk one glass of champagne too 
much. That is the worst sin committed in any 

1 191] 



MODES AND MORALS 



of the books, so far as I remember. Of course, 
the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but 
he had killed his man Inevitably, almost help- 
lessly, in self-defence; and besides, the treat- 
ment of Dan Is purely snobbish, from start to 
finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, 
Is acutely conscious of the social difference be- 
tween him and her own kin. The moment he 
lifts his eyes to Bess — ! No: the books are 
quite snobbish enough, in their way. Nat, 
foundling and fiddler, Is permitted to marry 
Daisy in the end (though, really, anybody 
might have married Daisy!). But Nat, though 
a parvenu, Is a milksop, and Is quite able to 
say that he has never done anything really 
disgraceful. The fact Is that their social dis- 
tinctions, while they operate socially, are yet 
all moral In origin. And this Is a very "special" 
note : the bequest, It may well be, of Calvin. 

We're the elect, and you'll be damned; 
Hell, like a wallet, shall be crammed 
With God's own reprobates. 

The transcendental Mr. March would never 
have sung It; but he and his knew something 
akin to those resolute discriminations. 

Another point Is perhaps even more inter- 
esting. There are not, I believe, any other 
books in the world so blatantly full of moral- 
ity — of moral Issues, and moral tests, and 
morals passionately abided by — and at the 

[ 192] 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

same time so empty of religion. The Bible Is 
never quoted; almost no one goes to church; 
and they pray only when very young and in 
extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so 
far as I know, in Little Women, is the 
patronizing mention of the Madonna provided 
for Amy by Aunt March's Catholic maid. And 
even then, you can see how broad-minded Mrs. 
March considers herself, to permit Amy the 
quasi-oratory ; and Amy does not attempt to 
disguise the fact that she admires the picture 
chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is only fair 
to remember that, in Miss Alcott's day, people 
were reading, without so much as one grain of 
salt, the confessions of "escaped" nuns, and the 
novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright — and 
that Elsie DInsmore developed brain fever 
when her father threatened to send her to a 
convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a 
right to flatter herself. Again, as I say, these 
are documents. 

There are many other straws to show which 
way the wind blows. Would any one but Miss 
Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief 
heroine to marry a Professor Bhaer? No mod- 
ern child ever quite recovers from the shock 
of it. But we must remember that, in Miss 
Alcott's time, German metaphysicians were 
not without honor in Concord. The breath of 
reform, too, is hot upon the pages. "Temper- 
ance"- — remember Charlie's unlucky glass of 

[ 193 1 



MODES AND MORALS 



champagne, and Laurie's promise to Meg on 
her wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous 
are a perpetual bath of lemonade. "Woman 
Suffrage" — recall the discussions alluded to in 
"The Pickwick Portfolio," and the fate of the 
few scoffers in co-educational Plumfield. The 
children are all passionate little Abolitionists; 
and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, 
unfamiliar patriotism, which touches, at its 
dim source, emotions that to us are almost more 
prehistoric than historic. 

In the minds of Miss Alcott's world, there 
is still a lively distrust of the British. They are 
wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat 
at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott's characters 
look a little askance at all foreigners — except 
German professors. There is no prophecy of 
the Celtic Revival in their condescending char- 
ity to poor Irishwomen. The only people, not 
themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the 
negroes. The rich men are nearly all East 
India merchants, and their money goes event- 
ually to endow educational institutions. The 
young heroes have a precocious antipathy to 
acquiring wealth for its own sake. Demi would 
rather, he says, sweep door-mats In a publish- 
ing-house than go into business, like "Stuffy" 
and his kind. "I would rather be a door-keeper 
in the house of the Lord" — it would hardly 
over-emphasize Demi's so typical feeling for 
the sanctity of the printed page; for the utter 

[ 194 ] 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

desirability of the publisher's own office, where, 
as he says, great men go in and out, with 
respect. And — to complete the evidence — the 
books do not lack the note of New English 
austerity, though they come by it indirectly 
enough. The New English literary tradition 
seems to be fairly clear: either passion must 
be public, or, if it is private, it must be 
thwarted. There is a good deal of public pas- 
sion — for philanthropy, for education, and 
what-not — in the books, after all. There is no 
private passion at all: though the books brim 
with sentiment, Miss Alcott writes as one who 
had never loved. It would be difficult to find, 
anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so 
empty of emotion. 

Straws show which way the wind blows; 
and these straws are all borne in the same 
direction. Is not this the New England on 
which, if not in which, we were all brought up? 
Any honest New Englander — a New Eng- 
lander of the villages, I mean — will admit that 
the New English are singularly ungifted for 
social life and manners. We suspected that 
long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if 
we happened to turn, after Little Women, 
to any one of Mrs. Ewing's or Mrs. Moles- 
worth's stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. 
Molesworth's heroines all were, by Walter 
Crane! The real "old-fashioned girl" was not 
Polly Milton, but Griselda, in The Cuckoo 

[I9S] 



MODES AND MORALS 



Clock. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. 
There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, 
even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in 
comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plot — 
as Heaven knows she did! Any New Eng- 
lander of the villages is familiar, too, with the 
passion for "education"; a passion that, I sus- 
pect, you can match now only in the Middle 
West. We all know that bigoted scholarllness, 
in combination, precisely, with nasal and un- 
grammatical speech, which there is no special 
point In flattering with the term "idiomatic." 
One or two of Mr. Churchiirs novels have 
preserved to us instances of It. We are for- 
tunate if we have come off quite free of the 
superstition, so prevalent through the March 
family, that a book — "any old" book — is 
sacred. We scoff heartily at the parvenu whose 
books are bound without first being printed; 
but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager 
would not rather have sham books than no 
books at all. We cannot help it. No other fur- 
niture seems to us quite so good. 

We have all been brought up, too, to be moral 
snobs. New England mothers must often be put 
to It to find purely moral grounds for discrimi- 
nating against some of the playmates their 
children would Ignorantly bring home. They 
must often yearn to say, without indirection, 
"I do not wish you to play with the butcher's 
little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school 

[1961 



MISS ALCOTTS NEW ENGLAND 

class makes no difference whatever." But the 
real New England mother never does. She 
must manage It otherwise ; since the only legiti- 
mate basis for her discriminations would be 
some sort of proof that butchers' little girls 
were apt to be naughty. The respective fates 
of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate 
as if they had been recorded by the official 
investigators of the Eugenics Society. The 
lack of religion, some one may object, is any- 
thing but typically New English. Perhaps, a 
hundred years ago, it would not have been. 
And we have not, to be sure, been transcen- 
dental with Impunity: we have the Calvinlstic 
Unitarian. But the average New England con- 
science has always had a more natural turn for 
ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss 
Alcott's books were brought up like ourselves, 
to obey their parents. It was Elsie DInsmore, 
on her Southern plantation, who (like a Pres- 
byterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father 
for religion's sake. Of course we all had to 
read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that 
w^Ithout asking. There was a good deal of 
plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in 
our and Miss Alcott's world. As for our un- 
worldliness: we have come a long way since 
Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even 
now, almost any bounder can take us in if he 
poses as a philosopher. So many have done it! 
I have not done more than indicate Miss 

[197] 



MODES AND MORALS 



Alcott's exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her 
for yourself, and you will agree that she gives 
us social life as New Englanders, for decades, 
have, on the whole, known it. The relations of 
parent and child, brother and sister, commu- 
nity and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of 
citizens, are all such as we know them. They 
are familiar to us, if not positively in our own 
experience. Life has grown more complicated 
everywhere. Yet I doubt If, even now, any 
New English child would instinctively call Miss 
Alcott's people underbred. We still understand 
their code, if we do not practise it. New Eng- 
land Is still something more than a convenient 
term for map-makers. These be our own 
villages. 



[198] 



THE SENSUAL EAR 

I HAVE a friend who always calls — when 
he remembers to, for alas! he sometimes 
forgets — the Methodist Church building in 
our village, a "conventicle.'' I wish he did not 
sometimes forget, for nothing makes me so at 
peace with my hereditary nonconformity as to 
hear an Anglican imply, by such verbal affec- 
tations, what he thinks of the dissidence of 
dissent. Methodism is as foreign to me as 
Anglicanism; yet, I doubt not, the Epworth 
League sings, in its handsome "conventicle," 
just the hymns that of old were sung by the 
Y. P. S. C. E. It is many a year since I attended 
a Y. P. S. C. E. meeting; and I have an idea — 
it is almost a fear — that Gospel Hymns, No. 5, 
is by this time Gospel Hymns, No. 10, and that 
some of the most haunting melodies are gone 
therefrom. Perhaps the "Endeavorers" are 
now chanting Hymns Ancient and Modern. 
But I hope not. Oh, I cannot think it I 

When life grows very dreary; when the 
Hindenburg line seems to turn from shadow to 
substance; when the Council of Workmen's 
and Soldiers' Deputies has indulged in a new 
"democratic"^ vagary; when flour has gone up 
two dollars more a barrel and the priceless 
potato is but a soggy pearl, deserving to be 
cast before swine; when another member of 

[ 199] 



MODES AND MORALS 



the family has broken a leg or had appendi- 
citis — then my husband (he, too, of yore an 
*'Endeavorer") and I are wont to burst, simul- 
taneously, mechanically, unthinking and uncon- 
spiring, into song. And the songs we hear each 
other humming In separate recesses of the 
house are Gospel Hymns. Humming, we 
converge upon the drawing-room from our dif- 
ferent retreats; and sometimes we look each 
other in the eye and say hardily, "Let's." Then 
we sit down and incite each other to a desper- 
ate vocalism. We see how many we can remem- 
ber, out of our evangelistic youth, and we sing 
them all. We remember a good many, if truth 
be told; and once I found a rapt huddle of col- 
ored servants on the stair-landing getting a 
free "revival." Neither of us has a voice worth 
mentioning, so I think that we must, without 
realizing it, have reproduced the fervor along 
with the words. 

They were cannily arranged, those Moody 
and Sankey hymns: if you sing them at all, you 
cannot help pounding down on the essential 
words. They wallow In beat and accent. "A 
Shelter in the Time of Storm^ We usually 
begin with that. It Is Ineluctable. But oh, how 
I wish that either of us could remember more 
than one "verse" of 

Well, wife, I've found the model church, 

And worshipped there to-day; 
It made me think of good old times 
Before my hair was gray. 

[ 200 ] 



THE SENSUAL EAR 



I have never heard it sung — I never **be- 
longed" to the Y. P. S. C. E. — but my husband 
says that he has. My husband also says that he 
has heard "the trundle-bed one.'* I do not 
believe it, though he is a truthful man. I can- 
not believe it; the less, that he remembers 
none of the words, and that it is only I, who 
recall, visually, in the lower corner of a page, — 

Poking (perhaps it was another verb) 'mid the dust and 
rafters 
There I found my trundle-bed. 

A slight altercation always develops here. 
Why should he be more royalist than the king? 
It is not conceivable that it was ever sung\ and 
even he cannot remember the tune; so we join 
forces in "To the Work, to the Work,'* or 
"There Shall Be Showers of Blessing." 

(Mercy-drops round us are fall-mgy 
But for the showers we plead.) 

He has an uncanny and inexplicable preju- 
dice against "God Be with You Till We Meet 
Again" — perhaps because they always sang It 
for the last one. But I can usually get him to 
"oblige" with a solo — "Throw Out the Llfe- 
Llne" — which I am sure was not in "No. 5," 
because we never, never sang it; though I do 
remember hearing a returning delegate to a 
Y. P. S. C. E. convention say that it was the one 
"the people of Montreal seemed to like best." 
Somewhere in the nineties, Endeavorers in 
[ 20I ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



thousands sang it all up and down Sherbrooke 
Street, apparently. Well: I am like the people 
of Montreal. It always "gets" me, In the dis- 
senting marrow of my dissenting soul; and 
when my husband has ''obliged" me with it, I 
am ready to forget the Council of Workmen's 
and Soldiers' Deputies. What can the devil do 
in the face of "Throw Out the Llfe-LIne," and 
Its "linked sweetness long drawn out"? 

By all of which It Is made evident that, in 
the matter of hymns, mine Is the "sensual ear." 
(Not so my husband's: he sings them In the 
critical spirit, as he might Illustrate a violation 
of rhetoric. He loathes "Throw Out the Life- 
Llne," even while the chorus makes his voice 
appeal and yearn In spite of him. As I said, he 
does It only to oblige.) The church of my 
choosing, if not of my profession, Is the same 
as that of my friend who talks of "con- 
venticles." There I sing Hymns Ancient and 
Modern (or that American corruption thereof, 
the Hymnal) with the most conforming. 
And certainly, except for a few time-honored 
chants which they share with all Dissenters, 
their hymns are to me "ditties of no tone." 
My husband disagrees with me; but he Is 
not, equally with me, the predestined prey of 
the brass band. He is better educated than I; 
has listened oftener at twilight to the en- 
chanted choirs of New College and Magdalen. 
He likes the non-committal melodies of the 

[ 202 ] 



THE SENSUAL EAR 



Hymnal far, far better than the sentimental 
parti pris of Gospel Hymns. 

I know as well as he does that the senti- 
mental quality Is of a sort that ought not to be 
there at all. I know that the music of "Throw 
Out the Life-Line" belongs morally with the 
music of "Old Black Joe," and "Oh, Promise 
Me," and "There'll Be a Hot Time In the Old 
Town To-night." I know that the appeal of 
that tune is sensuous and emotional and per- 
sonal, and, for a hymn, all, all wrong. I realize 
that, for* church, Gregorian Is the only wear ; 
and that the less you diverge therefrom, the 
more decent you are. I, too, prefer Bach and 
Palestrlna, and, for congregational singing, the 
oldest Latin hymns you can get. I can even see 
that the aridity and sameness of the Anglican 
"hymn-tunes" are more dignified, and more to 
the purpose, than the plangent and catchy re- 
frains by which Sankey lured "wandering boys" 
back to be safe-folded with "the ninety and 
nine." And yet, when my husband (by request) 
croons "Throw Out the Llfe-LIne," I cannot 
resist. I am evangelized. 

True, I perceived this perniciousness early. 
Perhaps the white light dawned on me when, 
in Y. P. S. C. E. days, an older friend (who 
was in love) confided to me that the words of 
a certain Gospel Hymn seemed to her not 
altogether reverent: they could so easily be 
applied to a human love-affair. She was quite 
[203 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



right, I think. Some of us have felt the same 
about Crashaw and Giles Fletcher. But though 
the words were, in all conscience, carnal 
enough, I believe it was the tune that did 
the trick and set her dreaming of her young 
hero. 

For I am his, and he is mine, 
Forever and forever. 

Oh, the yearning of that refrain: slow and 
honeyed and melancholy as "My Old Kentucky 
Home" or "Way Down Upon the Suwanee 
River' M Musically, doubtless, not so good; but 
musically of the same school, and suggestive — 
it, too — of plantations and moonlight and ban- 
jos and rich, heart-rending negro voices. My 
friend was right: they are not in the best tra- 
dition of reverence, those Moody and Sankey 
hymns. And yet — here's the rub — why do we 
remember them, when all but the most univer- 
sal of the hymns we sang in church and sang 
much oftener than these, have gone beyond 
recapturing? My husband resents remembering 
them; he would far rather remember more 
worthy things. But I do not : I would not, for 
anything, lose them out of the rag-bag which 
IS my mind. I am not sure I would not rather 
lose certain stanzas from the Greek Anthology, 
which come to my lips in much the same unvoli- 
tional fashion. From those refrains I recon- 
struct a whole moral and social world, even as 
[204] 



THE SENSUAL EAR 



Cuvier reconstructed his mastodon. You re- 
member what the "Evening Hymn" did for 
Mottram and Lowndes In "The End of the 
Passage"? Just that "I Know that My Re- 
deemer Lives" does for me. And — this Is the 
point — "Rock of Ages" and "Holy, Holy, 
Holy," do not do It; though I knew these even 
earlier, and am still, on occasion, singing them. 
So It Is not all a question of association and 
the power of youthful memories. It is the very 
quality of the music — the words were negli- 
gible, when they were not atrocious — that 
touched In me, and can still touch, something 
popular, emotional, vulgar; something very 
low-brow and democratic, not to say mobblsh. 
"The sensual ear." 

Even In youth, I had the sense to differen- 
tiate. "Jerusalem the Golden," discovered in 
another hymn-book than our own, was for 
many years my favorite hymn — even during 
those years when I was singing "Beulah Land" 
and " Wonderful Words of Life." I knew It 
was better; I knew I liked It better; I knew 
that It had more to do with religion than all 
the "Beulah Lands" ever written. True, the 
words helped; and the words of the Gospel 
Hymns were a hindrance, even then. But my 
soul recognized the vahdity, the reality of the 
music. "Jerusalem the Golden" remained my 
favorite until "The Son of God Goes Forth to 
War" succeeded It In my affections; always to 
[205] 



MODES AND MORALS 



be, until I die, my very favorite. And even 
while we sang — 

And view the shining glory shore. 
My heaven, my home, for evermore. 

I had memories of something still better than 
^'Jerusalem the Golden" : memories of an Inter- 
val in a French convent where we chanted the 
Magnificat to Its proper plain-song. Though, 
even there — ^but I shall come to that later. 

Not long ago, we had a friend staying with 
us who was bred a Romanist. How Moody and 
Sankey got mentioned, I do not know — but 
they did; and our friend Insisted that Moody 
and Sankey could not conceivably be so bad as 
the modern Catholic hymns. We exclaimed; 
she reaffirmed. There was nothing for It but to 
put the burning question to the proof. Quietly, 
by the fire, we staged a little contest. We sang 
our Gospel Hymns; and she — well, she sang 
dreadful things. There was In particular a 
hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodalities. . . . 
No, I think her "exhibit" was really worse 
than ours. It had the rag-time flatness without 
the rag-time catchlness, or the crooning negro 
quality. Bred up In part on such modern by- 
products of the Holy Catholic Church, no 
wonder that she succumbed utterly to my hus- 
band's rendition of "Throw Out the Life- 
Line." "I think it's lovely," she said; siding 
with me, to his great chagrin. How I wished 
[206] 



THE SENSUAL EAR 



that our friend of the "conventicles" were 
there to decide between us — he who in his 
youth was forbidden to accompany his friends 
to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings as he might have 
been forbidden to go to dime-museums. But 
he has no ear — "sensuaP'or other. Perhaps he 
could not have helped. 

Our Catholic friend's exhibit gave me pause. 
I knew that in France they sing, nowadays, 
hymns unworthy of Gothic architecture. Not so 
many years ago, In a beautiful French cathe- 
dral which I was by way of frequenting, I 
heard the children of some sodality or con- 
fraternity pouring forth as poor a piece of 
holy rag-time as any conventicle has ever 
echoed. It jerked me back into the past, vio- 
lently, as Hassan's carpet must have jerked its 
fortunate owner through space. 

Vierge, notre esperance, 

Etends sur nous ton bras, 

Sauve, sauve la France, 
Ne Tabandonne pas, 
Ne Tabandonne pas. 

So we sang it, too, at the Assomption, iri 
happier days, each with a veil and a candle, 
winding in and out among the green alleys of 
the convent park. But the young Tourangeaux 
went on to sing worse things : songs less catho- 
lic, more evangelical, with words more bitter 
and tones more shrill. I escaped, to return only 

[ 207 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



at the hour of Benediction, when I knew that 
the "O Salutaris Hostia" and 'Tantum Ergo*' 
would mount again with the incense towards 
the rich mediaeval windows. 

I fear It Is true, as our Catholic friend said, 
that the Church has fallen musically, as It has 
done architecturally, on evil days. Well: these 
shrill and senseless tunes are their equivalent 
for our Moody and Sankey. Even In conven- 
ticles, we have more dignified hymn-books for 
use In "church" as opposed to Sunday-school or 
Y. P. S. C. E., and the like. And as our Pri- 
mary Department (of the Sunday-school) was 
handed over to the works of Fanny Crosby 
Xdid she write 

Roses in bloom. 

Filling the room, 

With perfume rich and rare. 

I wonder? Anyhow, she wrote most of them), 
so the young Catholics In both France and 
America are handed over to the musical diva- 
gations of ill-educated priests. It Is a pity; for 
they have a tradition that cannot be bettered. 
My ancestors sang lustily out of the old Bay 
Psalm Book : 

Ye monsters of the mighty deep, 

Your Maker's praises spout; 
Up from the sands ye codlings peep, 

And wag your tails about. 

But, at the same period, their ancestors were 
singing the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages in 

[208] 



THE SENSUAL EAR 



undegenerate solemnity. It Is natural enough, 
perhaps, that I should have emerged on 
"There's a Light in the Valley for Me"; but 
why should they have emerged on *'Souvenez- 
vous, Jesus," and the Mariolatrous wailing of 
"Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late" ? Take as fine 
a Protestant hymn as, on the whole, we have 
inherited — *'0 God, Our Help in Ages Past." 
Its tune Is, to my thinking, bad : difficult to sing 
and monotonous to hear. But In the very 
church that these poor French infants are Inno- 
cently desecrating, a few hours, more or less, 
see a whole congregation chanting, with pas- 
sionless and awful reverence, 

Parce, Domine, parce populo tuo; nee in aeternum 
irascaris nobis. 

Whoever has heard that welling slowly 
from crowded choir, nave, and transept, the 
coifed peasant and the trained seminariste sing- 
ing In unison (no staginess of part-slnging 
there I), and has joined his voice to the multi- 
tudinous supplication, will not cease to regret 
that modern vulgarity Is as Catholic as it is 
Protestant. 

It was the most delightful of Huysmans's 
perversities to contend, in all seriousness, that 
the Devil, driven out of an immemorial haunt 
of his own near Lourdes by the advent In that 
spot of the Blessed Virgin, took his sullen 
revenge on the aesthetic sense of her priests. 
He could no longer hold his filthy Sabbaths 
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MODES AND MORALS 



there; but he could and did bewitch the clergy 
into making Lourdes a thing of ugliness. Their 
taste went wrong with everything they touched 
in Lourdes; and while Satan could not prevent 
the Blessed Virgin from working miracles, he 
could still bring it about that the faithful 
should be healed amid the most hideous 
architectural surroundings. Perhaps Huysmans 
would have credited the modern Catholic 
music unhesitatingly to the devil. 

But certainly Moody and Sankey were not 
clerics of Lourdes. Nor could the Presbyter- 
ians who first sang the rhymed version of the 
Twenty-Third Psalm to the air of "So bin ich 
vergessen, vergessen bin ich" be suspected of 
any part in the Devil's private feuds with the 
Virgin. Indeed, the particular Presbyterians 
whom I have heard sing it thus had not, I 
fancy, much more reverence for the one than 
for the other. 

I do not think that we can account for Gos- 
pel Hymns No. 5 by the Huysmans formula. 
Even the hymn to St. Joseph, beloved of sodal- 
ities, is, I believe, mere modern pandering to 
the uncultured majority : revivalism in essence, 
like Moody and Sankey and the Salvation 
Army and Billy Sunday. But at least the Cath- 
olics have this advantage: that though they 
too have indulged in operatic music and have 
even sunk to "Vierge, notre esperance," they 
still hear from their choirs the ancient music 

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and the ancient words. You lose the sodalities 
and confraternities when you hear once more 
the familiar "Tantum Ergo'* (I do not mean 
the florid one that they sing at St. Roch in 
Paris, and elsewhere) ; the new vulgarity is 
forgotten, as many vulgarities have been 
touched and then forgotten by Rome, in her 
time. 

I used to think that the worst of our bad 
Protestant hymns was their ignoring of the 
human intelligence. 

Many giants great and tall. 

Stalking through the land, 
Headlong to the earth would fall 

If met by Daniers Band. 

(My fortunate husband sang it in his youth.) 
But even that, while it could have a religious 
meaning, I should say, only for a sub-normal 
intelligence. Is not a deliberate and explicit defi- 
ance of the intellect of man. 

Verbum caro, panem verum 

Verbo carnem efficit: 
Fitque sanguis Christi merum; 

Et si sensus deficit, 
Ad firmandum cor sincerum 

Sola fides sufficit. 

Tantum ergo sacramentum 

Veneremur cernui, 
Et antiquum documentum 

Novo cedat ritui: 
Praestet fides supplementum 

Sensuum defectui. 



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MODES AND MORALS 



It took St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angellcus, 
thus to state, in one supreme utterance, the 
whole case against the Higher Criticism. 

No, I do not think that the sense of a hymn 
counts so much. The mediaeval *'Ave Maris 
Stella" has not much more to recommend it, 
philosophically speaking, than the hymn with 
the *'Im-mac-u-late, Im-mac-u-late" refrain. A 
poem, even a religious poem, is good poetry or 
bad poetry, and that is all there is to it. ''From 
Greenland's Icy Mountains'* is a silly poem, 
and "The Son of God Goes Forth to War" is 
a rather fine poem; and Bishop Heber wrote 
both. But the permanent superiority of the lat- 
ter is in the music to which it is set. One Pres- 
byterian sect sings, I believe, nothing but the 
Psalms — rather unfortunately metricized, to be 
sure — and their church singing is the drear- 
iest in the world. Yet the Psalms are rated 
high. *'Onward, Christian Soldiers" gets its 
appeal from Sir Arthur Sullivan and not from 
the author. I do not believe that "Nearer, My 
God, to Thee'* would have been the favorite 
hymn of the late President McKinley were it 
not for the slow, swinging tempo, which needs 
only a little quickening to be an excellent waltz, 
with all the emotional appeal of good waltz 
music. 

On the whole. Hymns Ancient and Mod- 
ern are far better, from the point of view of 
poetry, than Gospel Hymns, No. 5 — but 
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they have not converted half so many people. 
The elect, the high-brows, may say what they 
like: if you are doing your evangelizing on 
the grand scale, the ''sensual ear" must be 
pleased. I do not believe that the music I have 
referred to, of the "Tantum Ergo" or the 
*Tarce, Domlne," would ever convert the 
crowd in a tent or a tabernacle — even if D. L. 
Moody or Fanny Crosby wrote new words to 
it. But if you let a grammar-school pupil hack 
words out of the New Testament and set them 
to the tune of "Massa's in the Cold, Cold 
Ground" — well, it would be strange if some 
one were not converted. You may be very sure 
that the Roman Catholic Church has not taken 
to vulgar and catchy hymns without a set pur- 
pose of winning souls. 

At the Cross, at the Cross, where I first saw the light 
And the burden of my sin rolled away. 

It was there by faith I received my sight, 
And now I am happy all the day. 

The last line might almost have been lifted 
bodily from one of Stephen Foster's negro 
melodies. It has the very lilt of 

My old Kentucky home far away. 

And it is only one of many In Gospel Hymns, 
No. 5. That is why my husband remembers 
them, in spite of himself. He may contemn 
them, but he cannot forgot. There is hardly 

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MODES AND MORALS 



one of them that would not consort happily 
with the right kind of brass band. They con- 
note crowds and the "emotion of multitude." 
So, to me, does the "Parce, Domine" connote 
crowds — but crowds awe-struck, unweeping, 
and in no mood for stimulation by a cornet 
accompaniment. There is a cardinal difference. 
The success of almost any Gospel Hymn de- 
pends on an emotional appeal very like that of 
Kipling's banjo : 

And the tunes that mean so much to you alone — 
Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, 
Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan — 
I can rip your very heartstrings out with those. 

Whatever Bach and Palestrina and Scarlatti 
and good Gregorian do to you — well, it is not 
that. Whereas almost any good Gospel Hymn 
gets you, if it gets you at all, in the banjo way. 
There is the revivalistic essence in all of them. 
And when the Catholics wish to be revival- 
istic, they imitate, rather badly, the Protestant 
* 'hymn-tune." 

Most of my friends are so truly high-brow 
that they cannot be "got" in the banjo way. 
They do not like cornet solos ; and brass bands 
playing negro-melodies leave them dry-eyed. 
They honestly prefer the Kniesel Quartet or a 
Brahms symphony. Their arid and exquisite 
aestheticism rejects these low appeals. Did I 
not say that my husband loathes "Throw Out 
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the Life-Line" even while he is reducing me to 
an emotional crumple? I refuse to admit that 
I am Incapable of that same arid and exquisite 
aesthetlclsm ; but the lower appeal reaches me 
too. I do weep over the brass bands. I do 
choke over the flag appropriately carried. I do 
fall In love (If I am careful to shut my eyes) 
with a good tenor voice. And while there are, 
luckily, a great many people like my husband, 
there must be millions more like me. He re- 
members the Gospel Hymns; but I like them. 
Not quite to the trail-hitting point; but then 
I fancy the hymns of the tabernacle are less 
good than they used to be. I do not know the 
tune of "Brighten the Corner Where You 
Are." Though my six-year-old son has learned 
It from the cook, I do not believe he has the 
tune right. He cannot have It right: if it were 
right, there would be no sawdust trail. Nor do 
I know the music of "The Brewer's Big 
Horses Cannot Roll Over Me." But I have a 
suspicion that Billy Sunday's hymns are noth- 
ing like so good as Moody and Sankey. The 
dance music of the day always has Its effect 
on popular airs of every kind, even religious. 
I venture to say [pace the shade of Lord 
Byron) that the waltz, throughout the nine- 
teenth century, had a strong religious Influence. 
Every one knows that good waltz music, If 
played slowly enough. Is the saddest thing In 
the world. The emotion aroused by good waltz 

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MODES AND MORALS 



music well played is blood-brother to the emo- 
tion aroused by "God Be with You Till We 
Meet Again" and "For You I Am Praying, 
I'm Praying for You." Waltzes and Gospel 
Hymns reinforce each other — which is prob- 
ably why the unco' guid object to dancing. But 
with all due allowances for mob-emotion and 
the sensual ear, I cannot believe that syncopa- 
tion serves the Lord. People's eyes do not 
grow dim as they listen to a fox-trot. It does 
nothing to bring forth that melting sense of 
universal love which the old popular music 
did. All waltz music was in essence melan- 
choly; and all sentimental melancholies meet 
together somewhere in the recesses of the vul- 
gar heart. Yes: when popular composers were 
writing good waltzes, it was easier for the San- 
keys and Blisses to write good hymns. The 
Y. P. S. C. E. must have had easier work with 
the young people who were singing "Marguer- 
ite," than it has now with the young people 
who are singing "At the Garbage Gentlemen's 
Ball." I have a notion that the young people 
who are singing "At the Garbage Gentlemen's 
Ball" do not go to Y. P. S. C. E. meetings at 
all. Well, you see, those who sang "Marguer- 
ite" did. 

Those who know say that we are growing 
more vulgar all the time. Perhaps the differ- 
ence between D. L. Moody and Billy Sunday 
is a good index of that degeneration. Cer- 

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THE SENSUAL EAR 



talnly the silly young things who wept while 
they sang ''God Be with You Till We Meet 
Again" would not have pretended to call 
Christ up on the telephone — or have per- 
mitted any one else to do it in their presence. 
But, thank Heaven, the conventicles are like to 
outlast the tabernacle. 

At all events, I am sure of one thing: that 
my husband will not be persuaded, twenty 
years hence, to ^'oblige" with "The Brewer's 
Big Horses.'* But I hope he will continue at 
intervals to oblige with "Throw Out the Life- 
Line." For, so long as he does, I shall con- 
tinue to be evangelized. 



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I WAS reading a novel, the other day; had 
got about half way through it. The novel 
in question was by one of the younger Eng- 
lish authors. It was very odd, I thought to 
myself as I perused it, that I should not (for 
I read a great deal of fiction) have read be- 
fore anything by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. I had 
always meant to, but his work had, for some 
reason or other, not come my way. And I was 
glad I was reading it. I ought to have done 
D. H. Lawrence before. Some people had told 
me he was "different." He was not so different 
as all that; still, there was something fresh 
about him. Perhaps one could differentiate 
within that group, though I had long since 
despaired of doing so. I would certainly get 
something else of D. H. Lawrence's. At that 
point I decided to go to bed, and shut the book 
up smartly. The cover revealed to me that the 
author was J. D. Beresford. Why I had ever 
thought it was D. H. Lawrence, I do not 
know. Some false association of ideas at the 
moment of borrowing it, probably. 

The joke is on me, as the younger genera- 
tion would say. And yet, there is something to 
be said on my side. The fact is that I had not 
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expected D. H. Lawrence to be one whit dif- 
ferent from Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, 
Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver 
Onions, and W. L. George. I found, I thought, 
a little difference: not much, but enough to 
give one hope. To be sure, the hope would 
have ebbed, in any case, before the book was 
finished. My only gain was the knowledge that 
Mr. Beresford can do something besides Jacob 
Stahl. I have yet to experience D. H. Law- 
rence. Still, I submit that when, to distinguish 
between one author and another, you are satis- 
fied with so tiny a difference in style as appears 
between two works by the same man, it means 
that differences in style within that particular 
group are not very startling. One would never 
have read half of Tess and taken it for the 
work of Henry James; or half of Nostromo 
and taken that for the work of Meredith. One 
would have been brought up standing at the 
first page. It may be, as I say, that D. H. 
Lawrence is going to be to me, some day, a 
revelation of individuality. But the reviews do 
not give one much hope of that. 

Now, there are three authors in England 
who stand a little away from this larger group, 
though they are not precisely contemporaries 
of Hardy or of Conrad. Wells and Bennett and 
Galsworthy have some individuality of style. A 
chapter of Mr. Wells is "different.'' A chapter 
of Arnold Bennett or of Mr. Galsworthy is dif- 
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MODES AND MORALS 



ferent. Or let me put it in this way. You would 
not get through half of any one of Mr. Wells's 
later novels without a deal of pseudo-philosoph- 
ical reflection on the scheme of things. You 
would not read so far in any book by Mr. Arn- 
old Bennett without meeting and recognizing 
his peculiar kind of humor: semi-grin, semi- 
farcical. And I am sure that you would not get 
through many chapters of a typical Galsworthy 
novel without hearing a bird calling to its mate 
— not if there were a human love aflPair going 
on. I do not think you could comfortably sit 
down with any one of them for half an evening 
and think that you were reading D. H. Law- 
rence. You would know whom you were read- 
ing. 

These three gentlemen have, of course, been 
writing longer than the aforesaid younger 
group. They are, one might say, the elder 
brothers of the brood. If any one of them has 
served as model to the younger fry. It Is Mr. 
Wells. None of the younger fry has ever 
approached the technical excellence of Kipps; 
but, on the other hand, almost any one of them 
could have written Ann Veronica. Mr. Wells 
has certainly led them all astray In his time. 
But there is another equally important thing 
to be said: Mr. Wells has gone on. In his later 
phases, he stands quite apart from them all. 
The Research Magnificent and Mr. Britling 
Sees It Through are perfectly individual : they 
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are not, and never could have been, the 
product of a syndicate. Time was when Wells 
and Bennett seemed to be drawing near each 
other. TonO'Bungay is Bennett-ish in spots; 
and Bealby is, superficially, almost straight 
Bennett. But Mr. Wells, for weal or woe, has 
always been interested in the social scheme. 
The most important thing in Tono-Bungay 
is Bladesover and Bladesover's moral effect; 
and even in the ridiculous Bealby there is 
more than an echo of Bladesover. Mr. Wells 
is interested in moral values. Sometimes he has 
had very queer notions about them; but his 
reward for having been perpetually preoccu- 
pied with them is to have won through to 
The Research Magnificent and Mr. Britling. 
You may not agree with the hero of either 
book; but at least he is a person for whom you 
have respect. His is a dignified moral reaction, 
even if it is not the moral reaction you would 
have preferred. He is a serious person, envis- 
aging his relations to the world in a serious 
temper. 

One does not see Mr. Bennett's characters 
thus envisaging the world; not, at all events, 
since The Old Wives' Tale. And even in 
The Old Wives* Tale you feel rather the 
deterministic net in which the characters are 
caught, than any personal decisions of their 
own. The moral of the book is that heredity 
is more powerful than environment, if these 
[221] 



MODES AND MORALS 



two come to grips. In the later books, when 
they are not, like Denry the Audacious and 
Buried Alive, delicious bits of fooling, you 
get men and women of a monstrous egotism, 
of whom it cannot be discerned that either 
heredity or environment explicitly controls 
them against their will. An acute critic, who 
has incidentally had his own say about Wells 
and Bennett, told me the other day that he 
thought Bennett's people had "character." I 
should have said rather that they were "char- 
acters," in the colloquial sense. They have self- 
assertlveness ; like Aunty Hamps, they may sub- 
jugate their world. But "character" ? No : that 
is a finer, more complicated possession. They 
want things, sometimes good things and some- 
times bad; but they are (especially the women) 
blond beasts as to their methods. If there is, 
on the whole, a less decent creature In modern 
fiction than Hilda Lessways, or a more idiotic 
one than Audrey Moze, I have still to encoun- 
ter her. They invoke their gods 

By the hunger of change and emotion, 
By the thirst of unbearable things. 

Ann Veronica, as I once tried to point out, is 
not true to life : she Is a nice girl who proceeds 
to have reactions that a nice girl does not have 
without a lot of intervening history. Hilda is 
never a nice girl; she is a monster from the 
start and to the finish. As for Audrey — pace 

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Mr. Bennett — she Is a "moron," or very near it. 
Mr. Bennett spends more time on his female 
than on his male characters. He began with the 
evident intention of *'doing" young Clayhanger. 
But poor Clayhanger eventually turned into 
Hilda's daily bread. He exists only to be masti- 
cated by her. She lifts her head from that "fiero 
pasto," immitigable as Ugolino. 

Now, I may well be accused, by Mr. Ben- 
nett's admirers, of a belated Victorianism, be- 
cause I do not like his Hildas and Leonoras 
and Audreys. Well, I do not like Balzac's Val- 
erie Marneffe; yet surely La Cousine Bette 
is one of the great novels of the nineteenth 
century. Henry James, some years ago, drew 
a distinction between Thackeray and Balzac in 
their treatment of unpleasant characters; in- 
sisting that Thackeray did not give his a fair 
chance. "Balzac loved his Valerie as Thack- 
eray did not love his Becky," said Mr. James. 
However much Balzac loved his Valerie, he 
did not love her to the point of trying to make 
us think her delightful. The love he bore her 
was a love as impersonal as the right hand 
of Rhadamanthus : a love that consented to 
be just. Balzac may have loved his Valerie as 
Thackeray did not love his Becky; but he did 
not love his Valerie as Mr. Bennett loves his 
Hilda and his Audrey. He loved her, that is, 
in a quite different sense. Mr. Bennett posi- 
tively seems to think that Hilda is as decent 

[223] 



MODES AND MORALS 



as any one else, and more interesting than most 
people. If he does not really think so, then his 
method is at fault, and his books belie him. 
His method is not at fault in Denry, because 
there is no implication anywhere that Denry 
exists in a moral sense: he is a "card," and 
only a "card." It is never hinted that we ought 
to take him seriously. He is merely funny; the 
humor of him is the moral equivalent of an 
obstacle race or the pursuit of a greased pig. 
If only Mr. Bennett would keep to his 
Denrys ! For in the realm of extravaganza he 
is irresistible. Also, when he does the detail of 
the Five Towns, he is delightful for sheer con- 
vincingness. But he must stick to concrete de- 
tail. He must not deal with the human soul, 
for when he comes to moral reactions, he shows 
that he has no conception of differences. Mr. 
Bennett's world, frankly, seems to me like the 
world of the dead as described by the poet: 

Outside of all the worlds and ages. 
There where the fool is as the sage is, 

There where the slayer is clean of blood; 
No end, no passage, no beginning, 
There where the sinni^r leaves off sinning, 

There where the good man is not good. 

There is not one thing with another. 

But Evil saith to Good : My brother. 

My brother, I am one with thee. 

His world is a world where Evil saith to Good : 

"My brother, I am one with thee." If he can- 

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BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 



not write us another Old Wives* Tale, we 
must at least hope, as I say, that he will stick 
to Denry and Alice Challis. The Lion's 
Share does *not give much promise that he 
will do a second Old Wives' Tale. He has a 
positive fondness for mean people ; people who 
walk blind through a world with beauty in 
it; people who think their own emotions su- 
premely valuable simply because they are their 
own. 

The realists, I know, have always contended 
that an author should be impersonal; that he 
should not have an "attitude"; that he should 
record life as it is, without comment. Into the 
possibility or impossibility of that feat (the 
old technical controversy) we need not go, 
here and now. The general opinion is that you 
can tell where an author stands, in spite of 
him. Certainly Mr. Bennett is not impersonal; 
he does have an attitude. Not in any of the 
permitted ways (comment of other characters, 
logical and retributive results of committed 
acts, etc.) does he show himself suspicious of 
his people's real natures, or disapproving of 
their odiousness. If he were only scourging, 
satirist-fashion, the egotism of mankind, one 
could bear it. But no: Mr. Bennett seems to 
love his Yahoos. If he does not love them, 
then, as I say, his methods are at fault. 

Another author who has gone dwindling is 
Mr. Galsworthy. Tremendous hopes of him 
[225] 



MODES AND MORALS 



and of our permanent joy in him, we had 
when The Man of Property appeared. And, 
of course, one knows people who stick to him 
for his "style." One does not quite know why: 
as style, it cannot touch either Mr. Wells^s or 
Mr. Bennett's style. I fancy it is because there 
will always be a perceptible number of people 
who are reverent before long descriptions of 
nature. Nature, when it gets into a book, is 
somehow sacred. Perhaps it Is Wordsworth's 
fault. Literary pieties die hard. Anyhow, 
there always are long descriptions of nature 
in Mr. Galsworthy's novels, and If they are 
delicately confused with mating animals and 
human sex Impulses, and all the connotation 
of stirring sap and swelling buds and the like, 
that will certainly not make them any less 
popular. Yet the fact Is that Mr. Galsworthy 
has gone on, from book to book, steadily be- 
coming more sentimental and more flabby. 
I am speaking here of his novels. His Five 
Tales hold their own with The Man of Prop- 
erty, His work cannot be called rich in situa- 
tions, since he has never, so far, failed to repeat 
(I think I am not mistaken) the same situation: 
a man in love with some woman he has no 
legal right to be In love with. Often, that Is 
a very interesting situation; but It Is not the 
only source of drama in life, and one does get 
tired of It. And I do not think that Mr. Gals- 
worthy makes it any more interesting or sym- 

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pathetic by constantly Involving the vegetable 
world, or by punctuating every declaration of 
unlawful love with the calls of mating birds. 
One is tempted to assure him that "The flow- 
ers that bloom in the spring (tra-la!) have 
nothing to do with the case.'' But the sanity 
of W. S. Gilbert is gone from among us. 

With Thomas Hardy, one feels at least the 
reality of this intrusion of external nature; 
because, as some critic (I think, Mr. W. J. 
Dawson) has said, his people are children of 
the soil in no trite sense. They are akin to the 
landscape in which they move; they seem, that 
is, to have a personal relation to Gaia, like 
mortals in an old myth; to be half man, half 
rock or tree. They are apotheoses of the 
power of natural environment. But Mr. Gals- 
worthy's civilized people run down from town 
to hold hands amid the bracken because they 
feel that they are somehow justified by the 
fact of sap. It is all vague, of course; any- 
thing of that sort is bound to be vague. And 
if you are going to lean heavily on the cosmos, 
you want first to be sure that your point 
(Tappui is not a spot where the cosmic force 
has chosen to manifest itself in vapor. 

Mr. Galsworthy seems not to know in the 
least what he thinks about life. That state of 
maze may be satisfying to a hyper-sensitive 
soul, but it does not make for style. Besides, 
Mr. Galsworthy is old enough to have some 
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MODES AND MORALS 



idea as to what he does think about life. As 
far as one can make out, he thinks that most 
people are sensual, that everybody ought to 
be kind, and that there is a sustaining sanction 
for sex emotion in the fauna and flora of 
England. I do not know what Mr. Gals- 
worthy's totem is ; but it should be some small, 
defenceless bird. The snipe, perhaps. 

Justice is said to have had a profound 
effect on English officials. Of that, one is glad; 
but one's quarrel with Mr. Galsworthy is that 
he will never think anything out. He inveighs 
against solitary confinement, which is a good 
thing to do; but he does not offer any sub- 
stitute solution, which would be an even better 
thing to do. He sentimentalizes over dead 
pheasants and dead everything; but he gives 
you no suggestions as to what kind of laws 
to pass. He objects to existing divorce laws, 
but he does not come out into the open and 
say just what divorce laws, if any, he would 
propose to enact. It is not, apparently, either 
cowardice or expediency on his part; it is 
sheer inability to think constructively in any 
way. That is characteristic of many modern 
reformers: they want the bars let down here 
or there, but they never tell you in what spot 
the bars ought to be set up again. Beyond 
their gentle impulses, they are perfectly vague. 
It comes, I suppose, of trying to do your 
thinking with your heart instead of with your 

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head. And in Mr. Galsworthy^s case, the 
vagueness has permeated to the last recesses 
of his style. It is rhetorically accurate — "the 
English of a gentleman" — ^but it is jejune and 
spineless. It has become, you might say, a 
purely vegetarian meal. Only the graminivor- 
ous should read the later Galsworthy. And he 
will not rid himself of that fault by being 
increasingly explicit about sexual emotions. In 
fact, that never was his game. 

I may seem to speak bitterly. I confess that 
I feel some bitterness. For I admired The 
Man of Property exceedingly, and looked to 
Mr. Galsworthy to carry on a great tradition 
of fiction. Instead of which, he has gone on 
backing, backing — farther and farther away 
from the Presence. Some people, I know, gave 
him up with The Patrician because, they said, 
It was straight Mrs. Humphry Ward. I gave 
him up forever with The Freelands because 
it was bad Mrs. Humphrey Ward ; in fact. The 
Coryston Family was much better. 

Now we come to our syndicate. With which 
shall we begin? It is hard to choose. Indeed, 
can you deal with them separately? For the 
outstanding fact is that they all write alike; 
that they deal in the same characters, the same 
backgrounds, and the same situations; and 
that they have the same point of view. They 
are like the Pleiade or the seven New Real- 
ists. Only they do not know it. At least, they 

[229] 



MODES AND MORALS 



give no sign of intending to be several peas in 
one pod. Yet you would almost say that none 
of them had ever read anything but the works 
of the others. Is there some master-mind 
behind them, some literary Lloyd George or 
Dr. Fu-Manchu, who assigns their tasks; who 
says that Mr. Beresford, not Mr. Walpole, 
shall write of Jacob Stahl, and that Mr. Mac- 
kenzie, not Mr. W. L. George, shall deal 
with Michael Fane? And does Mr. Walpole 
sneak off o' nights to Mr. Beresford and offer 
to do some Jacob Stahl if Mr. Beresford 
will take a few chapters of Fortitude off 
his hands? Does Mr. Mackenzie write a page 
of A Prelude to Adventure while Mr. Wal- 
pole takes a turn at Sinister Street? Who 
does the murders? Is it Mr. Walpole or Mr. 
Onions? Which one of them has been ap- 
pointed to frequent the Empire? Does Mr. 
George investigate female psychology for the 
group? And what (but this I cannot even 
guess) does Mr. D. H. Lawrence "cover"? 
This may seem to be mere petulance, but 
it is not. The chief value of fiction is, I take 
it, to provide us with vicarious experience. A 
great novelist who sticks to the truth is, above 
all, informing. We enlarge our own world by 
reading him. No one, in his own person, can 
investigate all social milieux in all civilized 
lands; and the big novels and the big plays 
are text-books to the humanist. How much 

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intimate knowledge of France should we lose 
if we lost Balzac; how much intimate knowl- 
edge of England if we lost the great Victor- 
ians! Did we really, before the war, know 
anything about the Russian soul and tempera- 
ment except what we got from the Russian 
novelists? Most of us get our India from 
Kipling. There are not wanting people to 
quarrel with Kipling's interpretation, even 
with his description; but the fact remains that 
a vast number of people know a few simple 
facts about Indian and Anglo-Indian life that 
they would never have known without him. 

So that it is really not only the monotony, 
but the wilful extravagance, of the British 
syndicate that we complain of. Why waste 
half a dozen authors and a round score of 
novels to tell us the same thing in the same 
way? They do not even react differently to 
the same facts: they react precisely alike. Per- 
haps that is valuable as reinforcing and em- 
phasizing the stated or implied opinion. But 
one has the sense that one is never going to 
learn anythmg more from any of them; and 
that is discouraging to the humanist, on vicar- 
ious experience bent. Perhaps one should ex- 
cept Mr. Walpole from that charge, to this 
extent: he gave us something new in The 
Dark Forest. In that book, at least, he made 
the Russians pleasanter than any of their own 
novelists (except possibly Turgenev) have 
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succeeded in making them. But even so, if 
someone should tell us that Mr. Walpole, in 
the flesh, went to Russia to work with an 
ambulance corps, and that Mr. Beresford or 
Mr. Mackenzie wrote The Dark Forest from 
Mr. Walpole's notes, who could, from any 
internal evidence, deny it? If they were all 
Elizabethans, the scholars would still be 
wrangling over problems of their collabora- 
tion. Their novels would be like the Beaumont- 
Fletcher-Middleton-Rowley plays. 

To begin with, there is always the same 
young man. Sometimes he has a university 
education, and then he is the hero of Sinis- 
ter Street or The Stranger s Wedding; some- 
times he has omitted the university, and then 
he is the hero of Jacob Stahl or Fortitude. 
He has usually decided, when we meet him, 
that there is nothing in religion; he is usually 
anxious to do something noble and unconven- 
tional; and sooner or later he nearly always 
encounters very seriously a young woman 
of, actually or potentially, light morals. 
Sometimes he Is rich and meets her at the 
Empire; sometimes he is poor and meets her 
in the slums. Sometimes it is an accident, but 
usually he might fairly be said to be looking 
for her. For he is humanitarian, always ; either 
by his gentle nature, or because socialistic 
arguments have got hold of him; and a good 
deal of space is always given up to sheer in- 

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tellectual worrying. It is worrying — It seldom 
*'gets" anywhere; and though Mr. Wells's peo- 
ple "worry" similarly, and do not always get 
anywhere, still, with Mr. Wells, you feel as If 
those men would, perhaps, sometime win 
through to a philosophy of their own. They 
go at it in a more mature fashion; and they 
possess themselves of information. There is 
something of the hard scientific temper in his 
men. They are more apt to have got their 
humanitarianism out of a laboratory than out 
of their first sight of Piccadilly Circus at 
night. Mr. Wells's men, when they are likable 
at all, are likable for some intellectual quality 
in them, for their attitude to ideas. When the 
syndicate's men are likable, it is for sheer pity, 
because they are such helpless young fools. 

One expects every one in fiction, nowadays, 
to be an egotist; but one does sometimes sigh 
for the old days when an egotist knew enough 
to be polite. No one, I think, could feel any 
affection for Jacob Stahl; but it is possible to 
feel affection for Michael Fane, though it is 
perfectly impossible to feel him important, 
except as a householder always is important. 
Perhaps the most charming thing one remem- 
bers in any of these novels (they do not 
abound in charm) is the description of Oxford 
undergraduate life in Sinister Street. And 
it leads to — what? Michael's conscientious and 
pathetic progress among prostitutes and ruf- 

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fians. Luckily, he does not, In the end, marry 
Lily; but he is saved from it by mere accident. 
There was no reason to suppose that destiny 
would play on his side. 

This excursion into the underworld has be- 
come, in English fiction, almost as much de 
rigueur for a young gentleman as the grand 
tour used to be. Sometimes it is curiosity that 
urges him; but it is more apt to be a kind of 
humanitarian sympathy. The adventure is not 
new: one remembers, after all, Richard Fev- 
erel. But the temper in which it is taken is 
new. Richard was a chivalrous young fool; 
but then Mrs. Mount was something out of 
the ordinary. He did not, at first, dream what 
she was; and when he found out, she was able 
to lure him to think well of her. These young 
gentlemen we are considering do not have to 
be lured to think well of the young women 
they altruistically encounter. They know be- 
fore they meet them what they are going to 
be. They cultivate them because they are that, 
or are obviously going to be that. They prefer 
the girl of the lower classes; prefer marriage 
with her or free love with her, as the case 
may be. They find her more interesting, just 
as a settlement-worker finds the slums more 
interesting. The difference between them and 
the settlement-worker is that they are not out 
to convert her to religion or even to better 
manners. They are perfectly naive in their 

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refusal to perceive differences. They have a 
preconceived notion to the effect that there 
are no differences; and to that notion they 
often sacrifice themselves. Sometimes they sac- 
rifice the girl. 

You see, they do not think much of mar- 
riage, these young men. Jacob Stahl insists on 
going off to a solitary cottage with Betty Gale, 
unblessed. (Of course, he does have a wife in 
the background.) He never quite forgives her 
for wanting to be a legal wife. Though, char- 
acteristically enough, by the time she has rec- 
onciled herself to the irregularity (as any 
decent woman would have somehow to do, if 
she were going to endure it) his wife dies, 
and he insists on Betty's marrying him so that 
they can have children. Ann Veronica over 
again! But, indeed, Mr. Beresford has it in 
for marriage anyhow. I know of nothing more 
pathetic in modern fiction than the way Dick 
Lynneker, brought up among gentlefolk, suc- 
cessful in his own career, in love with a girl 
of his own class, has to cast about in his 
mind for some way of squaring that conven- 
tional situation with his radicalism. Up to that 
time, his only chance has been in approving of 
his sister's elopement with the village carpen- 
ter. Now he Is in love himself, and there is no 
obstacle, social or financial, to his happiness. 
But he has not protested against convention 
all his young life, only to sit down and be 

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comfortable now in a conventional situation. 
Listen : 

" 'I never tried to fight against my love for 
you, dear, after that first day at Oakstone,* 
he went on. *I hadn't ever cared before for 
anyone like this. I've never had any sort of 
love-affair. And now, I want . . . .* 

'*She clung to him eagerly. *What do you 
want, darling? she asked, and then added in- 
consequently, *I feel such a little thing.' 

*'He drew her down to her knees and knelt 
before her in the darkness. 'I want our love 
to be all our own. I don't want it talked about 
and stared at. If we get married, it must be 
as quietly as possible — and it must be after- 
wards, if you know what I mean, dear? That 
legal business isn't for us at all; It's only a 
kind of registration. Our love hasn't anything 
to do with anyone else. We must make our 
vows without witnesses. Do you know what I 
mean, dear? Don't you feel like that, too?' 

*'He felt her heart throbbing violently 
against his; and they clung to each other like 
two frightened children. There, in the stillness 
and the darkness, the world had vanished and 
they were alone; and afraid; and yet passion- 
ately desirous to draw closer together. 

" 'Oh I Dickie, I do love you so,' she whis- 
pered, as she put her lips to his." 

Mr. Beresford never tells us whether or 
not Dick put his idea through. Sybil was the 

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niece of a bishop. But then, Mr. Beresford 
made her. Perhaps Dick succeeded. The impli- 
cation certainly is that he was going to 
succeed. 

Now, I honestly think that pathetic. Not 
nearly so shocking as it is pathetic. For the 
author is looking for the realities of life in 
the wrong place. Every lover knows the sense 
of shrinking from a public ceremony. I doubt 
if any two people deeply in love with each 
other would choose, for their own sakes, a 
"wedding." Dick Lynneker need not think 
that his great idea is new. But look at the mad 
egotism of it! Take it that the legal or the 
ecclesiastical ceremony is merely a heavy price 
that one has to pay. Is that happiness not 
worth paying for? Generations of lovers have 
thought that it was. Suppose, even, that you 
think it not so much too heavy as the wrong 
kind of payment — something unjustly, shame- 
lessly exacted of you, that should never have 
been exacted at all; a sort of Oriental 
"squeeze." Other lovers, in other times, have 
had a kindred sense of desecration; but they 
have realized that society, from its point of 
view, had a right to demand of them this 
public acknowledgment. They have realized, 
too, that no public act of this kind could 
really touch or affect their private sense of 
their private sacrament. 

These modern folk are neither unselfish 

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enough to make their little salute to organ- 
ized society cheerfully, nor strong enough to 
realize that the merely conventional tribute 
cannot hurt their private sanctities. There is 
no such unselfishness or strength possible to 
a person like Dick Lynneker. If we must face 
free love, we must face it, I suppose. But 
nothing in heaven or earth need make us face 
a compromise like Dick's. Defy all ritual and 
symbolism if you must. But, for sheer topsy- 
turviness, commend me to his notion of insist- 
ing on the consummation's preceding, instead 
of following, the ceremony! There is quite as 
much superstition in one order of things as in 
the other. Dick Lynneker is bound, quite as 
much as his family, by prejudices. After all, 
the black mass is only the real mass reversed. 
I have dwelt on this instance because it 
seems to me typical, in its way, of the work 
of the whole group of English novelists. Ex- 
cept for Mr. Arnold Bennett, who seems to be 
satisfied with the mean and low-minded people 
of whom he feels that the world consists, they 
are all protesting. But they have nothing to 
suggest. When their own fitful attempts to set 
things straight result in failure or disaster, 
they blame the status quo. It never occurs to 
them to blame their own way of going about 
the business of changing things. A little study 
of history or even of sociology would teach 
them what not to waste their time on. But 
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their only use for the past is to "curse it out.'* 
*'Les grands-peres ont toujours tort." Yet they 
themselves go down like ninepins, knocked 
over by the same forces that, for a few thou- 
sand years at least, have been antagonizing 
the idealism and altruism of men. As I said 
before, one has some sympathy with Mr. 
Wells; for his people (his men, at least, since 
he does not think much better of women than 
does Arnold Bennett) are trying to inform 
themselves, trying to think it all out in terms 
of reason. The syndicate is not trying to think 
anything out. It rests content with replying to 
every affirmation of history: *'You lie." That 
is not argument: it is the mere sticking out of 
tongues. The conventionally accepted thing 
must be wrong; and that is all there is to it. 
Take the matter of their whole attitude to 
sex — which is, by and large, the question they 
are most preoccupied with. A certain person, 
a scholar and a gentleman, was pointing out 
to me, the other day, the accuracy of Chau- 
cer's treatment of Troilus. Troilus lets Cres- 
sida go, not because he does not love her 
passionately, but because the chivalrous code 
demands it of him, demands that he should 
protect her reputation. Pandar cannot move 
him from his knightly duty. If ever a hero 
loved exuberantly, it was Troilus. Yet the 
inhibition works. Chaucer knew what he was 
talking about. Whereas, as my interlocutor 

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went on to say, with these contemporary au- 
thors, the lack of inhibition seems to be the 
index of emotion. They ask you to take law- 
lessness for depth of feeling. The decorously 
behaved, according to them, are only the pas- 
sionless. That is plain bad psychology. For if 
love is the real thing, it takes perpetually into 
account the duty to the beloved. Love will 
bring out the scruples of a comparatively un- 
scrupulous person. No real lover wants to put 
the beloved "up against" anything disagree- 
able. And this being brave for someone else 
is not a natural expression of love. You may 
be brave to the rack and the gridiron for 
yourself; but being vicariously brave to the 
rack and the gridiron is a mean, modern kind 
of courage. Suppose you do not believe in the 
social order: the social order, none the less, 
is powerful enough to make a decent man want 
Its approval for the woman he loves. He does 
not wish to have her inconvenienced — not if he 
loves her. 

But the woman who does not wish to run 
up against the social order gets scant sym- 
pathy from the modern British hero. She 
ought to want to run counter to It; and if 
he has anything to say about it, she will jolly 
well have to. I do not know how other people 
feel about Betty Gale, but I am exceedingly 
sorry for her. I am sufficiently sorry for the 
girl who married Mr. Onions's murderer, the 
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hero of The Debit Account and In Accordance 
with the Evidence. I am even sorry for Pauline 
in Plashers Mead; though, frankly, I think Mr. 
Mackenzie is fairer to his characters than any 
of the others. These young women (I am 
speaking, you see, at the moment, of the re- 
spectable ones) have such selfish, cantankerous, 
and muddle-headed gentlemen to deal with ! 

Our authors do succeed in making their 
conventional folk disagreeable. That is, they 
make the hero acutely perceptive of the con- 
ventional vices. But if ever there was a case 
of the beam and the mote! Look at a fair 
list of them: the hero of The Invisible Event, 
of The Strangers* Wedding, of Round the 
Corner, of Plashers Mead, of The Debit 
Account. Was there ever a more vaporing 
bunch of egotists anywhere? A great deal 
of fun has been poked at the heroes of 
the romantic period : the Manf reds and Laras, 
the Heathcliffs and Rochesters. Their revolts 
against society have been jests for the critics 
to split their sides over, these fifty years. But 
they were dignified creatures in comparison, 
and they had far more sense of fact. They 
knew, for example, when they bucked society, 
what they were bucking. They knew the pro- 
cess was not going to be entirely comfortable, 
and they did not complain- of discomfort, be- 
cause they saw a reason why it should be 
made hot for them. They simply felt that they 
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had a quid pro quo. They had, as I have said 
elsewhere, the Satanic charm; they had also 
some of the Satanic logic. These heroes have 
been, for many decades, considered the wild- 
est travesties of humanity. But, indeed, they 
are far more comprehensible than the young 
men in the modern British novels. A young 
woman in love with Lara might well expect 
the worst; but at least she would know what 
to expect. Lara would never have shilly- 
shallied about among the conventions like 
Dick Lynneker, or Capes, or Jacob Stahl, 
changing his mind from chapter to chapter, 
and never knowing precisely what he did want, 
anyhow. Lara would have known what he 
wanted and why. He would not even have 
hesitated to attribute to himself an evil mo- 
tive, if he had one. But none of these young 
men would attribute to himself an evil motive. 
Whatever they want must be right; and if 
eventually they want the exact opposite, then 
that must be right, too. The bewildered wo- 
man follows in their wake. 

That is why, by and large, they are so 
corrupting. Yes, more corrupting than the 
effervescent geniuses of the nineties. You 
might be shocked by Dorian Gray, or by 
Aubrey Beardsley's gentlemen and ladies; but 
3^ou were never tricked into imagining that it 
was ^'up to you" to look like an Aubrey 
Beardsley drawing or to behave like Dorian 
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Gray. The shining Hghts of the nineties lived 
to epater le bourgeois — and they did it. On 
the whole, that was greatly to the credit of 
le bourgeois. People who would rather die 
than show themselves Spates (there are always 
a lot of such folk) were very entertained. I 
dare say some of these authors and poets did 
harm In their day. But they did not do it by 
deluding the public into thinking that they 
were virtuous: they did it by being witty at 
the expense of virtue. Our novelists are not 
witty at the expense of virtue (or at the expense 
of anything else, be it said in passing). They 
perform all their antics In the very name of 
virtue. They are right, and everyone else is 
wrong. 

Now the revoke with a programme we can 
endure, for we have often, during the mud- 
dled history of civilization, had to endure him. 
Sometimes he does a lot of damage; some- 
times he does a lot of good. The point is that, 
in either case, his emotional force has been at 
the service of his programme. The trouble 
with these people is that they have no pro- 
gramme. They are revokes because they are 
dissatisfied or in hard luck, and they hit 
wildly. They have not the brains to think 
anything out. Our friends of the nineties 
thought that nothing was sacred — except, per- 
haps, beauty. These folk know nothing about 
beauty — even Mr. Galsworthy, who may set 

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you down on a hillside to look at a lovely 
landscape, and leave you there for several 
pages, but who spends his time during those 
pages In Infecting that natural loveliness with 
notions of agrarian reform. The only thing 
that Is sacred to these young folk is their 
own impulses; which makes them about as 
satisfactory to deal with as the wild gun in 
Quatre-Vingt'Treize. Since their own impulses 
chop and change — and are always sacred — 
you can do nothing except express perfect con- 
fidence In their temperaments. You are not to 
know them by their fruits; you are to judge 
them by their good Intentions — for which you 
must take their own word. 

Nor are they "Ineffectual angels." If they 
only were! They are guilty of a lot of very 
Ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify 
them. So did the romantic hero-villains, you 
may say. Ah, but here Is the difference. The 
romantic hero-villains were proud, sometimes, 
of their sin; but they called It sin, even while 
they boasted of It. So did the aesthetes of the 
nineties. If it had not been sin, there would 
have been no fun in it. A very lamentable 
point of view, doubtless ; but less dangerous to 
society than the contemporary mode. For 
while you still call It sin, you are accepting the 
categories. If not the judgments, of society. 
You will not hurt society much while you 
accept its categories. What these young men 

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and young women do Is to call anything vir- 
tuous that they happen to want to do. They 
have not even the logic of Satanists, perceiv- 
ing evil and preferring it. The thing that is 
evil is the thing that makes them suffer; the 
thing that is good is the thing that pleases 
them. When free love is convenient, free love, 
only, is virtuous; marriage becomes virtuous 
the moment marriage becomes convenient. As 
you never know when obstacles are going to 
appear or disappear — as convenience is often 
in the hands of mere fortuitous fate — there 
is no test left. You must, I repeat, have blind 
faith in their temperaments. I do not think 
this is too hard a saying. 

As for the women who match and mate 
with the men: they do not give us much 
more hope. They are, to speak plainly, an 
unlovely lot. You may be as sorry as you 
like for them, but pity is not praise. Mr. 
Wells's women are too apt to be selfish and 
treacherous; Mr. Bennett's opinion is evi- 
dently that no woman can be decent unless 
she is a fool — like Constance, say, in The 
Old Wives* Tale. (I know there is Alice 
Challis; but I fancy Alice is only a symbol of 
what every man wants and never gets.) And 
look, for a moment, at the women described 
by the syndicate. They are cheap: hard with- 
out being strong; cold without being pure; 
sentimental without being kind. There is the 

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sensual type — Madeline Paignton, the aristo- 
cratic wanton, or Lily Haden, who cannot be 
continent for a few weeks, even for the sake 
of wealth and a husband; there is all the crew 
of light women among whom the heroes make 
their humanitarian progress. There is the 
intellectual (God save the mark!) type: the 
heroine of Gray Youth, or even Rachel Bea- 
minster, whose mental energy all goes Into 
revolt. If Mr. Walpolehad made the Duchess 
of Wrexe a human being, in whose reality we 
could believe, we might have more sympathy 
with Rachel's spiteful traffickings with the 
family ne'er-do-well. But we should have to be 
far sunk in fetishism to believe in the Duch- 
ess; she is a mere Mumbo-Jumbo; and her 
family seems about as intelligent as the first 
circles of Dahomey. Compare her, for an 
instant, with Lady Kew. No, a tyranny like 
that is an invented tyranny; it has nothing to 
do with life. The Duchess of Wrexe (to bor- 
row a term from the anthropologists) has no 
mana at all. Rachel's revolt is absurd; and 
simply shows up Rachel as a very disagree- 
able and headstrong person. True, there is 
always something to make their revolts ab- 
surd. They seem not to be dealing with facts 
at all, these young people; probably because 
they are all sentimentalists, and for a senti- 
mentalist a delusion is as good as a fact, any 
day. A wicked giant is, by definition, anything 

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you happen to be tilting at — even if In real 
life he is a windmill. 

You may say that two facts these charac- 
ters do often deal with: poverty and the sex 
instinct. Yes, they are sometimes poor, and 
have a hard time. But they have just as hard 
a time when they are not poor. Poverty is not 
the root of all evil, logically exposed as such, 
as it so often Is in the work of George Giss- 
ing. Not one of this group of authors has 
ever achieved the cumulative, Inevitable trag- 
edy of New Grub Street, for example: a 
far better indictment of some of the ills of 
the social order than all this modern mouth- 
ing. Indeed, not one of them is able to make 
anything seem inevitable. If they would only 
let the indictment be pitiless and let it stand; 
let us draw our own conclusions ! And as for 
poverty, have you noticed that even when 
these young men are as poor as the hero of 
Mr. Onions's trilogy, they get over it? They 
never end In poverty. Yet their grievances are 
not disposed of when they become rich. By 
that time, they are worried about something 
else. They have the complaining habit. Rich 
or poor, married or unmarried, they are al- 
ways, one foresees, going to complain. These 
authors convince one that their Utopia would 
be a hell on earth. They cannot reason; they 
cannot even dream convincingly. They are in 
a state of pitiful intellectual poverty — or, at 

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MODES AND MORALS 



least, penuriousness; for, If they have wealth, 
they certainly do not distribute it. 

The sex instinct is, on the whole, their long 
suit. I do not think there is much more to be 
said about their treatment of It. They have 
not painted for us a nobler, or a more roman- 
tic, or a more passionate love between man 
and woman, than have some of their predeces- 
sors. I cannot see that these novelists give us 
anything new in the way of human information 
— except, perhaps, just one thing. 

That one thing can best be described as a 
new theory — no, not a theory, a kind of 
Futurist presentment — of human types. There 
are just two possible things to do with the 
heroes and heroines of the new school; either 
to say that, as human beings, they do not 
exist; or to assume that they do exist and to 
lament the fact. The kinder, I believe, is to 
say that they do not exist. It is also the 
easier conclusion. For they are not consistent 
with themselves; they pass kaleidoscopically 
from one state of being to its opposite; as 
mortals, they are Incalculable, and as literary 
creations they are unconvincing. ^'I don't be- 
lieve there's any sich a person," is the natural 
reply to their presented cases. The authors 
have not the power of assuring us of the real 
existence of their characters. Life is not in 
them. If it is not a fault of vision, then it is 
a fault of technique. I have spoken of the 

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complete unreality of the Duchess of Wrexe; 
but she is no more unreal than Dick Lynn- 
eker, or the hero of Mr. Onions's trilogy. 
You can believe in far viler and wickeder 
people, if you must; you can believe in Moll 
Flanders or Carker or Long John Silver. 
It is not moral but intellectual squeamlsh- 
ness that makes it difficult to accept them. 
Psychologically speaking, they are freaks in 
side-shows. Mr. Bennett presents us with a 
whole gallery of ignoble folk; but one is in- 
clined to believe in some of them, at least. 
Indeed, one is inclined to believe, thanks to 
Mr. Bennett, that the Five Towns are almost 
entirely populated with such (which may be 
hard on the Five Towns, but that is Mr. Ben- 
nett's look-out). The syndicate has not Mr. 
Bennett's technique. 

Yet this is just where the very fact of the 
syndicate gives one pause. Since there are so 
many novelists in England doing precisely the 
same kind of inconsistent, unconvincing, un- 
lovable person, there may well be some gen- 
uine type that they are trying to describe. 
Almost never, it seems to me, do they "get It 
across"; but there must be people wandering 
about the English landscape who have given 
the syndicate the Idea. We hardly believe that 
their portraits are accurate; for their por- 
traits are not psychologically possible. But 
one comes to believe in prototypes. The syndi- 

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MODES AND MORALS 



cate would not all, at a given signal, have 
gone off their heads in exactly the same way. 
They must have some warrant in fact. If the 
prototypes of Jacob Stahl and of Dick Lynn- 
eker, of Rachel Beaminster and of the hero- 
ine of Gray Youth exist, these books are, 
in a sense, a portent. The Five Towns might 
be responsible for Hilda Lessways, but the 
Five Towns are not responsible for the girl 
in Gray Youth. One does not feel that the 
syndicate gives one more than circumstantial 
evidence, but of that, there is an almost over- 
whelming amount. This is depressing. Per- 
haps, eventually, Mr. Compton Mackenzie 
will resign from the syndicate and really tell 
us something. At present he too is bound by 
their conventions. But in Plashers Mead, tire- 
some as it is with the reiterant egotism of 
half-fledged youth, he does ''get it across." 
Certain people whose opinion is worth much 
more than mine, tell me that Mr. Walpole 
has got it across in The Dark Forest. I 
must admit, in my own case, the strict limita- 
tions of western Europe: it will take more 
than Mr. Walpole to make Russians credible 
to me. He seems to me no more plausible than 
Dostoievsky, and far, far short of Turgenev. 
And, after all, I am not sure that Nijinsky 
is not a better expositor than either. 

It has been much more difficult than I 
dreamed, to deal with these gentlemen at all. 
[250] 



BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD. 



The work of one shifts and plays into the 
work of the other so maddeningly that it is 
hard, not only to treat of them individually, 
but to treat of them even as a group. You 
think you have a line on Mr. Walpole, and 
you find him melting into Mr. Beresford or 
Mr. Onions. Everyone knows what a miser- 
able business a composite photograph is. No 
feature is really defined. These authors dif- 
ferentiate themselves just enough by detail of 
plot and setting and diction, to avoid a grand 
inclusive charge of plagiarism. You cannot 
say that one has filched a page from another, 
because there is no telling who began it. But 
I believe that, as far as style is concerned, if 
you Inserted six consecutive pages written sev- 
erally by the six of them, in any chapter of 
any book, no one would ever know the differ- 
ence. Of course, you would have to allow for 
different names of characters, and some havoc 
might be played with continuity of plot — if 
there happened to be any plot in that chapter. 
But the style would, I am sure, stand the test. 
Mr. Mackenzie forces his vocabulary as the 
others do not (he prides himself, I fancy, 
particularly on the number of his metaphors 
for the moon) ; but apart from Mr. Mac- 
kenzie's occasional exoticism, they write alike. 
They have the same rhythms, the same sen- 
tence-structure, the same syntactical habits. It 
is clever, nervous writing, but it is not the 

[251] 



MODES AND MORALS 



grand style. They are not memorable: they 
do not stand out, any one of them, or any one 
of their works, as a mental experience. The 
only adventure to be got from them is to read 
them all, and then, forgetting (as you inevit- 
ably do) who is who and which is which, 
analyze the effect of the group. It is a hazy 
and perplexing effect — as I fear I have too 
meticulously said. 

For in the long run, one's main feeling 
about the younger English writers is one of 
sheer disappointment. They have their repu- 
tation: people are always telling you that this 
one or that one is really important. I cannot 
believe that they are. As portrayers of life, 
they do not convince — a matter partly of 
muddle-headedness and partly of technique in 
the narrower sense. Moreover, they are dull. 
Mr. Bennett may not convince in the end, 
because in the end one becomes aware of his 
moral myopia; but he is not usually dull. He 
writes better than they do — that is what it 
comes to. If there were only one of them, we 
might put up with him; but how can we put 
up with six of him? There is not time. As for 
their attack on convention, whatever it may 
be, they will have to do it better to get any 
serious attention paid to them. You need sea- 
soned troops to attack that fortress — or at 
least bigger guns. The only person who thinks 
that anything, no matter what, is better than 
[252] 



BRITISH NOVELISTS, LTD, 



the status quo, is the anarchist. Most of us 
are not anarchists; and while most of us are 
willing to have things improved, if necessary, 
at our own expense, we want some assurance 
that they will be improved. And if we must 
make blind experiments — as the reformers all 
want us to — let us at least know the object of 
the experiment. These writers do not seem to 
know what they would like to achieve if they 
could. 

What they chiefly breed in one is hopeless- 
ness. If this is the best that England can do 
for us in the way of fiction, we must either 
encourage our native product, or eschew fic- 
tion and take to "serious" reading. These men 
are too dull. The time is ripe, once more, I 
believe, for a few big picaresque novels : some- 
thing in the mode of the Satyricon, and Gil 
Bias, and Huckleberry Finn, For I do not 
think that people will put up forever with 
being bored — especially as they are not boring 
us in the interests of virtue. 

To be sure — though it is some time since I 
began this essay — I have still not read D. H. 
Lawrence. 



[253 ] 



THE REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS 
OF RUDYARD KIPLING 

r^ looks Chestertonian as I write it. As if a 
world of concrete things were to be gath- 
ered into the titular abstraction; or as if 
Kipling's rightness were presently to be proved 
remarkable in that it is all wrong. 

And yet, I think, Chesterton or no Ches- 
terton — where is he, by the way? — I mean 
precisely what I have set down : Rudyard Kip- 
ling's remarkable rightness. Right, because 
time has sustained him against scoffers; re- 
markable, because no one originally expected 
that particular kind of rightness from him. 

This is not to be a discursive or an exhaust- 
ive discussion of Kipling's utterances on plan- 
etary or even racial questions. I have not 
annotated his complete works with his "right- 
ness" in mind. Indeed, to treat him exhaust- 
ively would be a very difficult task; for the 
sum of his wisdom is made up, not of a few 
big "works," but of an infinite number of 
significant brevities. My only excuse for deal- 
ing with him at all is that I have lived a long 
time with the prose and verse of Kipling, and 
that my knowledge of him has reached what 
Henry James called the point of saturation. I 

[254] 



REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 

will not pretend that I have read every word 
he has ever printed in the Allahabad Pioneer 
or even in the London Times \ but I know him 
very well. I belong to the generation that took 
its Kipling hard. My friends who are five 
years older or five years younger never took 
him quite so hard as that. They knew other 
gods. 

Rudyard Kipling, in his later life, has suf- 
fered under two great disadvantages: his in- 
sistence on a political point of view which was 
unpopular, and the gradual diminishing of his 
flow of masterpieces. The dullest people will 
tell you smartly that he is ^'written out''; the 
cleverest will tell you that he was precocious,- 
but always cheap, if not vulgar. Perhaps some- 
one will fling "The Female of the Species" at 
you. This paper is not to be a catalogue of 
Kipling's virtues, nor yet of his achievements. 
But I should like you to consider with me for 
a few moments that little volume of verse, 
The Five Nations.. I take The Five Nations 
purposely, for it is the Kipling of The Five 
Nations that I mean. Not the better known 
Kipling of the Barrack-Room Ballads or The 
Seven Seas, But supremely the Kipling I refer 
to. 

Two things changed the Kipling we first 
knew: renewed residence in England, and the 
Boer War. Of course, he was always an im- 
perialist; he always loved Lord Roberts — as 

[2SSl 



MODES AND MORALS 



long ago as the Plain Tales, when Kipling 
was at once younger and cleverer than anyone 
else. But he saw these things, then, from the 
angle of India; he was an imperialist only in 
embryo. He cared more for the British army 
— in red — than for the British navy; and 
Anzacs were not within his vision. 

Then — by devious paths — he returned to 
England; and England held him as it held the 
man and the woman in "An Habitation En- 
forced." The Boer War came; and The Five 
Nations tells how he reacted. He has gone 
on very consistently from that day, developing, 
but never swerving from the path of his con- 
viction. England did not listen to him: the 
Liberals of the first decade of the twentieth 
century did not propose to listen to anyone 
who wrote short stories for the sake of the 
plot, and verse for the sake of a Tory idea. 
They were much too serious In Great Britain, 
in those days, to hearken to Rudyard Kipling. 
And, so far as I know, neither Lord Roberts 
nor Kipling ever said, "I told you so.'* 

Yet listen to 'The Lesson" : 

It was our fault, and our very great fault — and now we 

must turn it to use; 
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a 

single excuse ! 

How one has heard that rough-and-ready 
poem reviled — In the early nineteen-hundreds ! 
Even now one recalls abusive editorials in 

[256] 



REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 

American newspapers about the poem which 
mentioned 

. . . the flannelled fools at the wicket . . . the muddied 
oafs at the goals. 

"Oblige me by referring to the files." I 
remember those taunting comments very well. 
Not an editor but was so sane that he could 
make his little mock of Kipling as an extrem- 
ist. But if you will get out The Five Nations 
and read *'The Islanders" through soberly, 
you will curse those editors for fools. "Pre- 
paredness" is so familiar to us all now, not 
only as a word but even as an idea, that we 
can hardly believe intelligent people were call- 
ing a man names fifteen years ago for stating 
axioms. We are always thinking the days 
of Galileo are over. But they are not; they 
never will be ; the human race instinctively and 
always has it in for Galileo. Kipling could 
get an audience for tales and ballads and 
jungle-books ; but the moment he tried to speak 
nationally, he could not get an audience. Even 
now, they would rather read H. G. Wells. 

Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how 

a gun is laid ? 
For the low red glare to southward when the raided 

coast towns burn ? 
(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to 

learn.)" 

"Yes, thanks," came the sarcastic answer 
from all the wise British millions; "we jolly 

[257] 



MODES AND MORALS 



well do wait." And they "jolly well" did; and 
a dozen years later It all came true, and their 
sarcasm was put where it belonged. That is, if 
they had the sense to see it. 

Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or 

ballot them back from your shore ? 
Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike 

no more? 

Well: it very nearly came to that. But I sug- 
gest that you re-read "The Islanders." I can- 
not quote any more. Every word of "The 
Islanders" is true to make one weep; and it 
was the storm-centre of The Five Nations. 
How many thousands of people felt that, in 
writing "The Islanders," Kipling had destroyed 
his own reputation! Doubtless the Germans 
would have felt the same way about "The 
Parting of the Columns"; though, if they had 
read it and had taken the trouble to believe it, 
it would have saved them a good many mil- 
lions spent in propaganda. But the Germans 
were quite as stupid as the British public. 

There has been more than one reason, as I 
have said, for the waning of Kipling's popu- 
larity. In the first place, he does not give us so 
many good stories as once, in the full flush of 
his genius, he did. That is a perfectly legiti- 
mate reason. Then, too, he has had an un- 
lucky trick of seeing ahead. When "The Edge 
of the Evening" was first published (in 1913), 

[258] 



J 



REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 

it passed for hysteria. Only "fools" believed 
in German spies — in 1913. But there are other 
causes more insidious and more potent. He 
stands, not only politically for the highest type 
of Toryism — at least, one fancies he does — 
but for a lot of other outdated things: pious 
attachment to the soil; romantic love, endur- 
ing, clean outside and in; the beauty of child- 
hood and the bitterer beauty of parenthood; 
patriotism unshrinking and unashamed; loath- 
ing of the mob and the mob's madness and 
meanness; the continuity of the English pol- 
itical tradition, from Magna Charta down; 
religious toleration; scrupulous perception of 
differences between race and race, type and 
type; the White Man's Burden. And I doubt 
if, even now, he is an ardent believer in 
Woman Suffrage. 

Almost any one of these attitudes would 
have been enough to damn him with the Brit- 
ish democracy. One quite understands that 
The Five Nations would not have been Mr. 
Lloyd George's vade mecum. One perfectly 
sees why Mr. Asquith, following the usual 
tradition, passed Kipling over for the Lau- 
reateshlp in favor of a gentleman whom few 
people had heard of and no one could read. 
("The Widow at Windsor" probably shocked 
Balllol as much as it shocked Queen Victoria.) 
No Kipling-lover, for that matter, particularly 
wanted Kipling to be Laureate. One even real- 

[259] 



MODES AND MORALS 



izes — though this time with amusement — why 
he is persona non grata to the "brittle intel- 
lectuals who crack beneath a strain." The 
intellectuals say that he is good at times for 
children, and often for the vulgar, and take 
their refuge in not taking him seriously. The 
intellectuals have been Russianizing them- 
selves, in these last years; and Kipling's 
laughter at that phenomenon must have been 
unholy. They could scarcely afford to feel 
him remarkably right, it would prove them so 
remarkably wrong. 

As I say, one quite understands why the 
gorged and flattered workingman, the dema- 
gogue, and the "brittle intellectual" have not 
read him or listened to him; but it is none the 
less a mystery that some one should not have 
listened to him and seen that he was eminently 
sane on many vital points. There is, after all, 
no one living in England who writes so well, 
who is so nearly master of the English lan- 
guage. But one has to conclude that his audi- 
ence has made up its mind only to be amused 
during a train-journey. 

There was a merry little International cor- 
respondence in 1914 or 1915 over "The Truce 
of the Bear." What did Mr. Kipling say now? 
It was all a great joke on him. People also 
raked up "The Man Who Was." I believe 
Mr. Kipling never replied to his humorous 
questioners, or, if he did, It was to the effect 
[ 260 1 



REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 

that a man, like a government, might change 
his foreign poHcy with changing conditions. 
Still, everybody was very much amused, and 
for some reason (It can have been only his 
unpopularity) very much pleased. Perhaps 
they had not forgiven some of the other poems 
in The Five Nations, and looked to dis- 
credit Kipling by pitching on "The Truce of 
the Bear" as they had once pitched on *'The 
Islanders." With Russia driving back the Teu- 
tons on the eastern front, I do not see that 
Kipling, as a patriot, could proceed to defend 
his ancient position very loudly. But I do not 
remember — here I speak under correction, for 
his war-poems are very elusive — that even 
since 1914 he has written of Russia as he has 
written of France. And I have often wondered 
If, In the last months, he has not taken a very 
private comfort In his own refrain of years 
ago: 

Make ye no truce with Adam-zad, the bear that walks 
like a man. 

He may at least feel that he was essentially 
right about Russia, If incidentally wrong. If I 
am not mistaken, *'The Truce of the Bear" 
was written on the occasion of the Invitation 
to the first Hague Conference. We took it that 
it was the Tsar whom England was to mis- 
trust. Very likely. But I cannot help believing 
that Kipling had a private suspicion that the 

[261] 



MODES AND MORALS 



Hague Conference was all tommy-rot. Which, 
obviously, it was, pragmatically judged. The 
sheer decency and competence of certain Rus- 
sian generals did save the world in the first 
year of the war: let us never forget It. There 
never was a Russian steam-roller, but the Ger- 
mans thought there was going to be one. Let 
us, as I say, never forget it. But for the last 
year, the Russian people has been behaving 
allegorically In the sense of the poem. 

*When he stands up like a tired man, tottering near and 

near; 
When he stands up as pleading, in wavering, man-brute 
guise. . . . 

When he shows as seeking quarter, with paws like hands 

in prayer, 
That is the time of peril — the time of the Truce of the 

Bear!' 

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless, asking a dole at the door, 
Matun, the old blind beggar, he tells it o'er and o'er; 
Fumbling and feeling the rifles, warming his hands at 

the flame, 
Hearing our careless white men talk of the morrow's 

game; 

Over and over the story, ending as he began : — 

* There is no truce with Adam-zad — the hear that looks like 
a man /' 

I should be particularly sorry to say any- 
thing that German propagandists would like 
to have said. It is perfectly impossible for the 
average person to know what is the proper 
[ 262 ] 



REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 

and what the improper attitude to take to 
Russia at the moment. Even those in high 
places might be forgiven for being perplexed. 
What the average person perceives is that the 
Russians are behaving very much, and very 
vividly, like "the bear that looks like a man." 
Certainly they stood up at Brest-LItovsk *'in 
wavering, man-brute guise.'* 

The only point of all which Is that the folk 
who made so merry, a few years ago, over 
"The Truce of the Bear'' had better find 
another joke. One does not base the rightness 
of Kipling on his merely having been a little 
less ridiculous, in a given instance, than his 
contemporaries wanted to think him. 

I wonder, too — still as I turn the pages of 
The Five Nations — if there is not a tonic 
value today in the poem called "Sussex." 

God gave all men all earth to love, 

But since our hearts are small, 
Ordained for each one spot should prove 

Beloved over all; 
That, as He watched Creation's birth, 

So we, in godlike mood, 
May of our love create our earth 

And see that it is good. 

So one shall Baltic pines content, 

As one some Surrey glade, 
Or one the palm-grove's droned lament 

Before Levuka's trade. 
Each to his choice, and I rejoice 

The lot has fallen to me 
In a fair ground — in a fair ground — 

Yea, Sussex by the sea ! 

[263] 



MODES AND MORALS 



So to the land our hearts we give 

Till the sure magic strike, 
And Memory, Use, and Love make live 

Us and our fields alike — 
That deeper than our speech and thought. 

Beyond our reason's sway, 
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought 

Yearns to its fellow-clay. 

The windy internationalism to which we are 
so often invited, nowadays, to listen, would 
deny it — might even call it ^'chauvinisme de 
clocherJ* The reply is that people actually do 
feel as Kipling says they do. He has always 
tended to serve (in his own phrase) the God 
of Things as They Are. Granted, for the sake 
of argument, that it would be good for you to 
love all men and all countries alike, the fact 
remains that you do not. If that is your duty, 
most decent people do not perform their duty; 
their fathers did not, and their children will 
not. Even the most radical internationalists 
wish to substitute class-consciousness for patri- 
otism — on the whole, a less enlightened chau- 
vinism than the other. And, judging from the 
present war, they have not been able to pull 
even that off. 

As for saying that one has the same sense 
of personal insult in seeing a foreign land 
invaded as in seeing one's own, that is non- 
sense. France has been the home of the spirit 
to many of us; the thought of an invaded 
France is of a bitterness hardly to be borne. 

[264] 



REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 

But though one has lived In it and loved it, 
one is not so angry, in the very depths of one, 
at Teuton occupation of France as one would 
be at Teuton occupation of one's own soil. I 
will not say what German invasion of my own 
New England would be to me. "Ten genera- 
tions of New England ancestors" would rise 
up to curse the enemy. But even an Invaded 
Oshkosh (and Oshkosh Is a mere name to me) 
would be to me, an American, an even dead- 
lier insult than an Invaded Paris. I should take 
it more personally, I know. And If that can be 
so for us. In our far-flung, heterogeneous re- 
public, what must be the case with the children 
of homogeneous France? If I know that I 
should feel that way about Oshkosh, what 
must the Kentish man feel about Kent, the 
Devonshire man about Devon, the Englishman 
about England? Did not all sane Americans 
between Bangor and San Diego react in pre- 
cisely similar fashion to Herr Zimmermann's 
plans for Texas? I have never even been in 
Texas, but Texas belongs to me and I belong 
to it. 

No: say what you please, geography is the 
great human science; It is more Intimate than 
biology. And Kipling has had the sense to see 
it because he really knows something about 
the genus homo. It was a delightful phrase of 
the Frenchman's that charmed our youth — 
"the passion for the planet"; but are we not a 

[265] 



MODES AND MORALS 



little undeceived now? Do we not at last real- 
ize that the only real "man without a country" 
is the cosmopolite? If there be such a person. 
I can almost hear someone quoting iron- 
ically, 

But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed 

nor birth, 
When two strong men stand face to face, though they 

come from the ends of the earth. 

That is very taking; and in a sense it is true, 
thank Heaven. But I fancy Kipling would 
want to modify it now. At least he would like 
to write a foot-note containing a careful defi- 
nition of the word "strong." It would not 
apply to the average German. 

Kipling was called, for many years, by the 
pacifist-Liberals, a jingo. All imperialists were, 
ex officio^ jingoes. Some of these people have 
got into their heads, by this time, the concep- 
tion of a "preparedness" that makes for 
peace, and realize the difference between a 
real jingo and a man who wants to avert war 
in the only way possible when a considerable 
portion of the world remains militaristic. We 
all know by this time that, if England had 
been prepared in 1914, there would have been 
no war in 1914; that, very probably, if Sir 
Edward Grey had been empowered to say, at 
the proper instant, that England would fight, 
there would have been no war in 1914. Had 
[266] 



REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 

"The Army of a Dream" been there, the 
mailed fist would not have been shaken at the 
world. But that is ancient history. It is to be 
hoped that not every one who preached pre- 
paredness in the old days is now stigmatized as 
a jingo. If anyone still thinks of Kipling 
vaguely as a war-mad imperialist, let him read 
"The Settler": 

Earth where we rode to slay or be slain, 

Our love shall redeem unto life; 
We will gather and lead to her lips again 

The waters of ancient strife, 
From the far and fiercely guarded streams 

And the pools where we lay in wait, 
Till the corn cover our evil dreams 

And the young corn our hate. 

That is not the accent of the dyed-in-the-wool 
jingo. 

And here again — still out of The Five 
Nations— the "Half-Ballad of Waterval" : 

They*\\ never know the shame that brands — 

Black shame no livin* down makes white, 
The mockin' from the sentry-stands. 

The women's laugh, the gaoler's spite. 

We are too bloomin' much polite. 
But that is 'ow I'd 'ave us be . . . 

Since I 'ave learned at Waterval 

The meanin' of captivity. 

Written at least fifteen years ago — and still, I 
fancy, the core of the matter. Certainly very 

[267] 



MODES AND MORALS 



different from Imperialistic-militaristic concep- 
tions of the rights of prisoners as exemplified 
by — Wittenberg, let us say. 

All these later quotations go to show 
merely that Kipling need not have been so 
slanged for The Five Nations, since in much 
of The Five Nations he has pretty well 
expressed fundamental British feeling — as is 
now, day by day, being proved. And — let us 
face it squarely — fundamental British feeling 
is on the whole the most decent on earth. As 
Americans, we like to think that we share it. 
No one, to be sure, paid much attention to the 
poems just cited: they took it out in criticizing 
things like "The Lesson," "The Islanders," 
and "The Old Men." Now we find that in 
those much-execrated poems he told the simple 
truth. Why not admit it? Admit, that Is, 
ungrudgingly, not only that he has been right 
since 1914, but that he was right much earlier, 
and that it is the other people who have had 
to shift their point of view. 

But policies — as well foreign as domestic — 
have, from of old, made bitter enemies and 
excited acrimonious controversy. No one could 
have said anything worse about Kipling than 
political folk in all the serious English reviews 
were saying (before the war), all the time, 
about their political opponents. You could 
never take up one of those famous periodicals 
without feeling that vitriol had been spilled in 
[ 268 ] 



REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 

your very presence. If there Is a special rhet- 
oric of vituperation, the EngHsh political 
article was its textbook. We milder Americans 
gasped. No Southern gentleman, on the floor 
of the Senate, ever went quite so far. 

So we should expect Kipling to be called 
horrid names by those who disagreed with him 
politically, because that is English political 
manners. No one really minds, except as one 
has always resented the doom of Cassandra. 
What one does mind, what one does resent, 
is the judgment of the "Intellectuals" on Kip- 
ling's general human knowledge. They seem to 
agree with Oscar Wilde that, in turning over 
the pages, "one feels as if one were seated 
under a palm-tree reading life by superb 
flashes of vulgarity. . . . From the point of 
view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who 
drops his aspirates. . . . He is our first author- 
ity on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous 
things through key-holes, and his backgrounds 
are real works of art." Even Henry James 
spoke of him tentatively, as a young man who 
had gone a long way before breakfast. Politics 
always make people see red; but the human 
emotions in general, people ought to be able 
to discuss amicably. And the Intellectuals have 
never been willing to discuss Kipling at all. 
When he is dead, they will, of course. But at 
present they still consider him negligible. 

Now no one — unless Rudyard Kipling him- 
[269] 



MODES AND MORALS 



self — IS less tempted than I to set Rudyard 
Kipling up as "saint and sage," or to try to 
establish a Kipling philosophy or a Kipling 
cult. You may take a man seriously without 
taking him religiously, I should hope. But the 
intellectuals take other people religiously, not 
to say seriously; and why Kipling is to be 
forever relegated by our arbiters of taste to 
the ranks of the frivolous or the hysterical or 
the vulgar, passes the normal understanding. 

Two demands can respectably be made of 
a writer, In order that he should be taken 
"seriously" : that he should be to some extent 
a master of style, and that he should have 
sane and serious things to say about life. To 
those who insist that Kipling is not a master 
of English style, one has, really — now I come 
to think of It — nothing to say. Especially as 
many of them will tell you, with straight faces, 
that Galsworthy, or Arnold Bennett, or some- 
one else, is a master of style. Chiefly, It means 
that they care so little about what he says that 
they belittle his way of saying It. They persist 
in taking a purely momentary point of view. 
Kipling, I fancy, can afford to await the judg- 
ment of posterity. He Is destined to become a 
great English name. 

There are probably several reasons for this 
critical scorn. One Is that he writes short 
stones, and short stories are not yet so digni- 
fied as novels — unless the writer be Mau- 

[270] 



REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 

passant. Some of the critics have never read 
anything but the earliest Kipling. Largely, It 
is because they have not the faintest approxi- 
mation to a Chaucerian or Shakespearean 
sense of life — life, good and bad, high and 
low, grave and gay — and they find no charm, 
no "distinction" in the blessed, common, earthy 
Englishness of the English scene. Most of all, 
they are uninterested in the very universality 
of the emotions and events he deals with: 
patriotism, love, childhood and parenthood, 
duty, and death. Nor have they much taste for 
laughter. As for tradition, they are so busy 
scrapping it, that they are not concerned with 
illustrations of its continuity and deathlessness. 

I could get up a better brief for Kipling on 
the human score, if I were not making it a 
point of honor to stick to The Five Nations. 
For Kipling has gone on very much, even since 
then. The Five Nations deals particularly 
with the Boer War and reactions after the 
Boer War. His more explicitly "human" wis- 
dom is not to be found there in greatest meas- 
ure. Yet in some ways The Five Nations 
comes home to us just now more than other 
things, when we are in the midst of the very 
war which he therein prophesied. 

Take the "Chant-Pagan." When the war is 
over, there will be some millions of English- 
men (to leave out the other Allies) who will 
come home singing that chant — if not literally, 

[271] 



MODES AND MORALS 



then in spirit. In fact, that is the most encour- 
aging thing in all Kipling for the reformers — 
except that I do not believe the returned sol- 
dier will care much more for the English in- 
dustrial paradise than for the "Squire an' 'is 
wife." Even old-age pensions and the abolition 
of great estates, and all the other articles of 
Lloyd George's faith, are not going to make 
him happy. He is going to know too much 
about real values. There is just a chance that, 
after having saved England in the field, he 
may save England at home. There will — God 
send! — ^be so many of him. No man can 
prophesy; and yet already, in America, one 
hears people wondering about our own boys, 
In the very sense of the "Chant-Pagan." 

Naturally, as I say, the more personal hu- 
man relations are not dealt with in The Five 
Nations. But there remains "The Second 
Voyage." I do not know that anything saner 
or wiser or more poignant has ever been writ- 
ten about that love between man and woman 
which is the bulwark of Occidental civilization. 
No one can deal more tenderly than Kipling 
with the idyll between boy and girl — look at 
"The Brushwood Boy." He can even deal con- 
vincingly with the great illicit love (though it 
is not a favorite theme of his) — witness 
"Without Benefit of Clergy" and the great 
paragraph in "Love o' Women." But the love 
that he most often treats Is the love between 

[ 272 ] 



REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 

husband and wife: the love that is built on 
shared tears and laughter, on deep domestic 
sympathies and clean sex-attraction, the love 
that many waters cannot quench. In "The Sec- 
ond Voyage" he explicitly renounces all others; 
it expresses love, if you like, more or less 
according to the prayer-book. He sacrifices to 
the god of Romantic Marriage. If you choose 
to put it that way, there ain't a lady livin' in 
the land as he'd change for 'is dear old Dutch. 
Perhaps that Is why they call him vulgar. 
Many of our "serious" contemporaries appear 
to resent any account of human relations that 
is both vitally human and essentially decent, 
because it leaves at one side their two pre- 
ferred groups: the very sophisticated, and the 
criminal classes. 

I suspect that one difficulty, for the more 
sincere, if still brittle. Intellectuals, lies in 
the unconventional verse-forms which Kipling 
often affects. They can stand any amount of 
slang in prose, but they cannot endure it in 
verse. At least, they do not believe that "high 
seriousness" can wear such a garb. I dare say 
they would throw out even "The Second Voy- 
age" on the score of unconventionality. Well: 
let them. I was going to quote some of It, 
but I am too out of temper with the intellec- 
tuals. They may read it for themselves. And 
probably none of the moderns would be able 
to endure the mention of "Custom, Reverence, 

[273 ] 



MODES AND MORALS 



and Fear." I give it up. But they need not 
think that Kipling's own education in the mat- 
ter of sex-relations stopped with the Gadsbys. 
To the mind of the serious Kipling-lover, 
the thing that grows more and more impres- 
sive is his universality. Perhaps it seems to 
some an unimportant list of allegiances that I 
have mentioned: "pious attachment to the soil; 
romantic love, enduring, clean outside and in; 
the beauty of childhood and the bitterer beauty 
of parenthood; patriotism unshrinking and un- 
ashamed; loathing of the mob and the mob's 
madnessi and meanness; the continuity of 
the English political tradition, from Magna 
Charta down; religious toleration; scrupulous 
perception of differences between race and 
race, type and type; the White Man's Bur- 
den." Many a man has had a tablet in West- 
minster Abbey for a lesser creed. And almost 
no one has sought his wisdom and his delight 
in so many places or so many classes of 
society. Engineers, subalterns, ladies of the 
manor, cockney privates, Hindu bearers, Boer 
farmers, half-caste Portuguese nursemaids, 
Gloucester fishermen, bank clerks, reporters, 
young English children, German scientists, 
law lords, public-school boys, lamas, pilots, 
children of the zodiac, even the beast-folk of 
the jungle — what a Shakespearean welter, and, 
humanly speaking, what a Shakespearean re- 
sult! It is the "good gigantic smile o' the 

[274] 



REMARKABLE RIGHTNESS OF KIPLING 

brown old earth." And the far-flung adventure 
has brought Kipling back to a very simple but 
not too easy code. At least, one cannot say 
that he sticks by the most English of English 
traditions because he has never seen anything 
else. He has had room and chance to choose. 
He has ended by being very orthodox, not to 
say conventional, about the fundamental hu- 
man duties; and he reads history with a canny 
eye. But I do not think anyone can accuse Kip- 
ling of being a stick-in-the-mud. ^'With the 
Night Mail" does not look so Jules Verne-Ish 
now as it did when it was printed. Perhaps 
some day we shall even have to give the bene- 
fit of the doubt to the later "flight of fact" 
called "As Easy as A. B. C." Though I admit 
that that is going far. 

Just there, I did leave The Five Nations 
for the moment; but it is impossible to men- 
tion "As Easy as A. B. C." and not also quote 
some of "MacDonough's Song." 

Whether the People be led by the Lord, 

Or lured by the loudest throat; 
If it be quicker to die by the sword 

Or cheaper to die by vote — 
These are the things we have dealt with once, 

(And they will not rise from their grave) 
For Holy People, however it runs, 

Endeth in wholly Slave. • 

Whatsoever, for any cause, 
Seeketh to take or give 

[275] 



MODES AND MORALS 



Power above or beyond the Laws, 

SuJfFer it not to live ! 
Holy State or Holy King — 

Or Holy People's Will- 
Have no truck with the senseless thing. 

Order the guns and kill ! 

Saying — after — me : — 

*Once there was The People — ^Terror gave it birth; 
Once there was The People and it made a Hell of 

Earth. 
Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain ! 
Once there was The People — it shall never be again !' 

Easy enough to see why Kipling is not popu- 
lar. Yet Kipling Is by no means the only 
person who Is warning us that mob-rule may 
come and sweep away our Institutions. Most 
people who fear that event are doing their 
best to Ingratiate themselves with the mob 
before It wholly loses its temper. I confess 
that — ^politics apart, and as a mere matter of 
dignity — It Is a comfort to hear some man 
speak in another spirit and sense than that of 
craven conciliation. I have not quoted from 
"MacDonough's Song" because I think it is 
a great poem; but because it is perhaps the 
most nakedly, blatantly ^'unpopular" thing Kip- 
ling has ever written. There it is, openly ad- 
mitted, in all its offenslveness — his greatest 
crime. Damn him for it If you feel Inclined, 
but confess that to write as uncompromisingly 
as that is better manners than to have loathing 
[276] 



REMARKABLE RIGHT NESS OF KIPLING 

or fear in your heart and honey on your lips. 
"We reason with them in Little Russia," says 
Dragomiroff in "As Easy as A. B. C." Well, 
it looks as if, several generations ahead, that 
might still be the method in Little Russia. The 
story was written in 1912. 

The Five Nations ends with the "Re- 
cessional," which preceded the Boer War by 
three years. And there is nothing to add to 
the "Recessional," even now; except that Ger- 
many needs to read it, at present, more than 
England does. All that I have meant to do is 
to point out that Kipling was right about pre- 
paredness, right about the Colonies, right 
about Germany, right about Russia, right 
about the Boers, right about Kitchener, right 
about demagogues and "labor," right about 
the elderly politicians, right about the decent 
British code, right about patriotism and the 
human heart — right about love; and that for 
all those things (except the last) he was 
slanged as if he were wrong. In political mat- 
ters, "thought is free," with us, at least. But 
in the matter of literary criticism, it seems a 
pity not to realize the worth and distinction 
of the few people we have who possess either. 
I have been told that Kipling still sells better 
than any other author in America. When I 
think of Harold Bell Wright, I hope, for the 
credit of America, that it is true. Perhaps the 
attitude of the intellectuals is mere snobbish- 

[277] 



MODES AND MORALS 



ness, which cannot consent to think a best- 
seller literature. But, as I say, it is a pity that 
the greatest living master of English style (for 
Conrad's is a restricted field) should not be 
confessed to as such by the few who still pro- 
fess to care about style. One would not mind 
so much if they did not commend such a lot 
of third-rate stuff. 

I am glad that Kipling himself has the vul- 
gar consolation of royalties. He has, to be 
sure — I repeat — the disadvantage of telling 
the truth prematurely. If we have just about 
caught up with The Five Nations — well, let 
us hope that the argument from analogy will 
not work in this case : that we shall never have 
to catch up with ''As Easy as A. B. C"; that 
that, at least, may not be an instance of his 
remarkable rightness. For it does not make 
one happy about the immediate future. 



[278] 



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